


From Afghanistan with Love

by SinningVirtue



Category: James Bond (Movies), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 003 - Freeform, Agent John Watson, James Bond Fushion, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-25 09:18:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/637377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinningVirtue/pseuds/SinningVirtue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He meets Sherlock a year after his name becomes his own again.</p>
<p>After the star-burst scar on his shoulder leaves him aching for the field, for the numbers before his name, for M to give him that cold, calculating stare and send him off to Singapore or Morocco or Israel. </p>
<p>After he's faded back from Agent 003 and into John Watson, boring and dull and needing something more, more than anything. </p>
<p>He thinks Sherlock can give it to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You Only Live Twice

**Author's Note:**

> I'm aware that I already have an open Sherlock story, one I will be updating within the week, promise, but I was battling some serious insomnia and this is the result of...two days without sleep and seven cups of coffee. It wouldn't leave me alone, so I wrote it.  
> I really hope everyone likes it, leave a comment if you want me to continue it.

From Afghanistan with Love

When he graduates, John Watson joins her Majesty’s Royal Army.

 

Basic training settles a comfortable kind of urgency on his bones that reminds him of what it means to be alive and makes his heart pump all the faster. Body armor becomes his skin, and his gun is as an extension of his arm as the medical equipment he carries. He learns to love the color of sand and the flavor of desert sky, when his boots finally find the ground. He wins hands at poker, and loses them, and he smiles among acquaintances he knows can never be friends.

 

Making friends makes the living dead. 

 

It gives that dull, cracked look in a man’s eyes and makes his trigger finger pull before a room is clear. It makes him chain smoke in the faces of Afghani children and watch blood spatter like it’s artwork. It makes his soul malleable, twistable under the hands of war until they are fabricated to be something _other._

 

Something that finds war to be a religious experience, who prays to the bodies of blackened terrorists and civilians alike, and finds, in their death, a not quite sated desire for revenge. 

 

John doesn’t want to be that man.

 

So he makes no friends.

 

The men know him as Three Continents Watson by the time his first tour is under his belt, and the women do oh so love a man in uniform, but he likes to think it’s the charisma. It’s the smile, that really gets them.

 

He can’t remember any of their faces. The fact doesn’t bother him as much as he thinks it should.

 

He spends his time allowing the extension of his arm to speak for him a thousand yards away, and becomes his unit’s top sniper within the first two months. He kills more, then. Close range and long.

 

He becomes used to the dying light and final breaths.

 

His doctor’s oath sometimes weighs heavy on his shoulders, _I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant._ He shoots a man six miles from Herat and doesn’t see the children he hid behind him until they smear their skin with blood trying to bring him back to life. _I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know._ Two men in his unit, Swanson and Brown, strip a woman of her hijab in public, bruises flare to life on her skin from their hands. The village stones her two days later. _Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks._ He pulls a little girl out of her burning school, and she calls him a saint in her language. He doesn’t feel like one _. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty._ He doesn’t sleep much, but he’s never at less than his best. He can’t afford it. _Above all, I must not play at God._

 

By the middle of his second tour, he has a reputation among those they fight, those they hunt in secret caves up high above, the ghosts in the desert. They do not have a name for him. They just whisper about a doctor with a viciousness and power that rivals the explosives that tear a new sun beneath the pressure of a Humvee. They are afraid, and John fights harder.

 

They lose men quick and hard and John tries not to feel anything. He’s never been too good at that.

 

They are replaced, or they go home, but John stays there.

 

He needs this, can’t explain why. Needs it. He grows bored too easy, and spends the quiet nights mapping the most dangerous areas of the country, his time training, his mornings wishing for a firefight to rival all the rest.

 

When the war finally becomes monotonous, finally becomes easy as breathing with the excitement blurring around the edges, John worries, as is his right to worry. There are demons behind his eyes, now, and he worries about what kind of man he’ll become when they rise to the surface. When they take the desert and mold it between callused, gentle hands, when he becomes the monster Al Qaeda whispers about.

 

One day he wakes up unable to recall what drove him here in the first place. He doesn’t remember feeling anything but the impulsive need to touch the sky and dodge a bullet.

 

That scares him.

  

Xx 

 

They find him in the mountains near Nuristan, the sand-colored tarp of their tents building a small and unstable city against the berating winds and cold nights, but there is no fire on this night. There is nothing but the slow rise and fall of voices over cards and a map of recently discovered cells dotting the lower broad curve of the Hindu Kush.

 

John is bored, reclining in a fold out chair with his helmet upside down in the dirt at his feet. The night’s cold and impossibly dark; the silence swallows him on all sides and makes everything slow and foggy. He almost doesn’t realize he’s being approached until it’s too late.

 

But he does.

 

“Dr. John Hamish Watson.”

 

There has been no alert, no radio, no communication that any higher-ups were coming to his lowly unit at the ass-crack of the mountains and the breakneck zone for dirty combat. They show no badges, offer no names. John’s got his gun before he’s totally sure of what he’s doing, but it feels like the right thing to do, and he knows enough not to question his instincts.

 

“Put your gun away, chap. No need for that just yet,” a young man says. His hair is slicked back and his suit is too expensive to ever see combat ground in Afghanistan. His features are cultured, light tan skin and sharp cheekbones with curving lips. An older woman stands calmly at his side; grey hair cut short and sharp eyes that seem to dig their way into the very fabric of John’s soul.

 

“’Yet’,” John echoes; his fingers find a familiar hold on his Browning. “I think I’ll hold onto it just as well, thanks.”

 

The woman almost smiles at that, seems to be fighting it, and says, “I think you’ll be a good choice indeed.”

 

“For?” John asks, and he feels young beneath her eyes, though he has seen two tours at the very front of the front lines, though he has twenty five years under him that have taught him more than most, though he is a Captain. It is like she has seen a hundred thousand lifetimes, like she has taken the centuries to integrate herself into the very heartbeat of the world she has come to know inside and out.

  

She doesn’t answer him, and he finds himself, rather suddenly, thinking of her as beautiful. Though the years have weathered away the clear symmetry of her face and time has rounded her hips and her short stature only suits to make her seem stockier, she has a keen elegance to her that reminds John of a knife blade. He feels caught beneath her gaze. 

 

She smiles, then, and it’s a hard thing. It’s a secret thing. 

 

“The crown has need of you, Dr. Watson. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be the most dangerous and complete you’ve ever undertaken.  I would leave my associate to explain it to you, but I can already see you’re willing to agree.” 

 

“Who do you work for?” John asks, because he’s seen enough spy movies to be quick on the uptake, and it seems an appropriate thing to ask. The woman seems to think so too. 

 

“We do not exist, Dr. Watson. And if you join us, neither will you,” she says boldly, bluntly, no hint of apologies or sympathy. They both know that home has little to offer him. 

 

And just like that, John gets it. The silence swells between them, and the handsome man beside her chuckles softly to himself. John doesn’t ask what’s funny. 

 

“Disappearing act, eh? I’ll think about it while I wait for the next attack. Since it’s a fucking _war_. I can’t just up and leave.” But he wants, _god he wants._

 

He wants out of this dry hell hole and into something faster, something that will drive him to very edge of everything and shove him off, so he can get caught in the wind and lose himself in the adventure. The desert has grown too bitter on his tongue, and the open sky has lost almost all of its wonder. 

 

“You can lie to yourself all you want, but don’t think about lying to me. You want something more, and I’m the only one in a position to offer it to you.” 

 

“An offer from no one doesn’t mean very much to someone,” he pointed out with a smirk. He liked her. 

 

“You obviously don’t know the right no ones.” 

 

“Granted, the only non-entities I know here happen to reside in caves with the intent to murder me and the larger whole of democratic society.” He has made no effort to stand, instead settles further into his chair with his gun resting across his knees. 

 

He wonders how they got his information to begin with, and decides he doesn’t particularly care. 

 

“And that fact excites you,” she said bluntly. “You need it. The rush. And I can give you the biggest hit of your life. It’ll never stop, you’ll ride the high until you’re retired or dead, probably the latter, but that doesn’t scare you either. In truth, Dr. Watson, you need us much more than we need you. 

 

“Transport will be here for you in four hours, think about it.” She says it like she assumes he will say no, like he will stay where he is and refuse her offering in favor of the continuation of his tour, of his medals, of his known valor. 

 

John stops her before she can turn away with just a look, curious and calculating. “What’s your name?” It’s a kind of test, and he’s sure she knows it. He will always wonder what the most dangerous sector of the British government saw in _him._

 

She accepts his challenge with a regal sort of pride, acknowledging his understanding and confirming his suspicions. 

 

“You will call me M.” 

 

Xx

 

He is given a number with two zeros and a license.

 

The one before him had died six months ago on a mission in Singapore, and he slides easily into the vacancy he left behind. He never asks why he is higher than the man who accompanied M in Afghanistan whose status as seven seems to gather him more respect than most, just like he never asks after the results of his preliminaries. Never asks why he was chosen. Never asks after anything, and M likes him for it.

 

He doesn’t ask because in his third week, he broke into the record room, and finds himself to be only two points below a perfect score in marksmanship, highly proficient in hand to hand, expert in more than four languages thanks to his downtime in college, expert in resourcefulness thanks to his time in the war, and the rest of it kind of blends together in a sea of jargon about his mental state and ability to adapt to anything.

 

He tries not to be too proud of himself.

 

Xx

 

At twenty six, on his birthday, he’s given his first mission.

 

He spends the week in the Czech Republic, dismantling a multinational Mafioso group hell-bent on infiltrating a nuclear facility in the east. He drives a fast car, and the explosion at the end of the sixth day is enough to make him grin manically and shout “ _I love this job!”_ into his comm unit.

 

His quartermaster thinks he’s insane, but that’s to be expected.

 

Xx

 

For his next birthday, he buys himself an Aston Martin 2 Liter 1937 Speed Model, and he loves it more than anything else he owns, including the Sig he keeps tucked close to him at all times.

 

He doesn’t take it on missions, but when he’s in London, he drives it through the night until the dawn casts a grey-yellow light across the cloudy sky. And he feels kind of like he’s floating, flying. He wonders if this is happiness.

 

Xx

 

It’s more like Six Continents Watson.

 

Until he gets a short, but interesting mission in Antarctica and the whole world feels at his feet.

 

Xx

 

He likes M. And M likes him.

 

He’s very loyal, very quickly.

 

Xx

 

He finally gets what Bond found so funny.

 

He doesn’t exist but his name and his number are hushed whispers on the mouths of criminals everywhere.

 

He finds it funny too.

 

Xx

 

It’s a decade after he was first signed by M, that he goes back to Afghanistan.

 

Nothing much has changed, except for the efficiency with which he exterminates his targets and the size of his job. The remoteness and the risk. After tense hours searching through low, squat buildings, John executes two men with the capability to topple the fragile and young emerging peace in the country, two men who shouldn’t have the intelligence they do, who have nothing to their name but body counts, who have a card tucked neatly into the inner folds of their thobes.

 

Gunfire ricochets off the stone wall to his left, and he ducks behind it quickly, shoves a fresh round into his Sig and hates that it’s his last, but can’t bring himself to hate the thrill the knowledge sends down his spine. The business cards are held tightly between his second and third fingers, and he burns the name into his memory.

 

“Agent, status report.”

 

M sounds frustrated, sounds bitter and worn down by the run around they’ve been having. John’s had six missions in six weeks, and he’s beginning to feel the wear on his bones. He feels he is moving too slowly. For the first time in a long time, he doubts his ability to make it out alive.

 

M has been thinking about moving him up, and he knows it.

 

He wants it.

 

“There’s no way these two found the capability to topple UN-Afghani peace on their own,” he bites out over the roar of bullets. John breathes out, slow and calm, twists, fires twice, and rolls back to his safe-haven. There is no discernible decrease in the amount of ammunition finding a home in the concrete protecting him. “Business card on both of them, possibly the one that got them the intel.”

 

“The name?”

 

He fires again, his blue eyes sharp and trained on the lower wall of the compound he’d dived into. Dust is beginning to kick up and it swirls violent and stinging into the blackness of the night. Something is thrown from the window of the bird, and John takes off at a run, skids through the sand and feels the heat of the blast against his face. The helicopter above him is not friendly at all.

 

Masked men fire back at him, and he ducks, weaves through the hailstorm of fire and lead and thinks about praying. Grenades and rockets go off around him like pyrotechnics at a rock concert and it’s too much to weave through. He is backed against another wall, his body thrumming.

 

“ _The name, agent!”_

 

He hates this mission.

 

It was supposed to be in and out, before his week of much needed vacation in the Swiss Alps. Bond offered his cabin, and John hadn’t even bothered to thank him properly before accepting the keys and jumping a plane into the very heart of Al Qaeda.

 

When he slips inside, he follows a dimly lit hallway with a sinking feeling settling on him. There is a metallic stink to the air; it hovers in the cement walls of the compound and water pools too heavy on the lower floors, sloshes against his boots. He didn’t like that. Not at all.

 

John finds the men, and drags them outside of the immediate range of their friends. They will say nothing about their supplier, and the alarms are already blaring, so John shoots them.

 

Twenty minutes later and he was pinned, and he knew it. At least thirty men descended on him, and his heart felt as if it would burst from the confines of his chest. He’s never felt more alive. He can still see the neat print from the business card, it’s burned into his retinas, and he’s ready to speak, the Sig heavy and not enough in his hands.

 

He can see the stars, a hundred thousand watching an Agent fall.

 

He doubts he’ll get that promotion.

 

“ _M--”_

 

And he stops seeing anything.

 

Xx

 

When he wakes, he’s in a place with bitter water and rusted tools.

 

They put a bullet in his shoulder, and do _something_ to his leg he doesn’t watch. It’s hot and ripping and searing and he thinks maybe a brand, maybe acid, maybe a knife. He is told later he is right on all counts, but the damage is superficial enough to give him full mobility.

 

He’s never screamed like this before.

 

Most of the time, they don’t even ask questions. They just make sure he forgets the look of black script on a white card, the formation of a name in his mind, on his lips

 

At some point, he starts begging for his life, but he isn’t sure when.

 

Time stops being linear and starts being blood. When he bleeds and when he doesn’t. Water. When he chokes on it and when he doesn’t.

 

Xx

 

It takes three weeks, in the end.

 

Three long fucking weeks.

 

When 007 hauls him up off the floor and drags him back into the sunlight, John throws up onto the sand. He can’t put weight on his leg, can’t move his arm. Can’t breathe.

 

Can’t remember the name.

 

Xx

 

It takes two weeks of PT before M comes to visit him. He doesn’t look at her. She doesn’t say sorry.

 

“After all this time, _ten years--_ ” he can’t quite finish. He doesn’t have to. M knew where he was. Of course she did. She waited.

 

“It was necessary.”

 

“ _Fuck all if it was necessary!_ I trust you to watch my back, M, like I watch yours _!_ ”

 

John looks at her then, and her eyes are just the slightest bit red, just the slightest bit watery. He’s never been so angry. 

 

“Watson, you can’t be sent back out. Maybe if it’d been six years ago, but now?” she asks, and he thinks she looks so much older, so much more worn. The years have not been so kind to them.

 

He doesn’t think about it. Just wants _out._ Feels the cold concrete and bitter water beneath him, feels his leg throb with pain it shouldn’t have any more. They’d fixed him, he’d thought. But the memory still wears too heavy on him.

 

“I can’t be a desk worker, I need the field,” he says, because they both know that it can’t be undone. She doesn’t say she’s sorry, she doesn’t have to.

 

“You have been invaluable to--”

 

This hurts them equally, so John cuts her off.

 

“I know.”

 

Xx

 

He is given back his name, and 003 fades back into John Watson.

 

Ordinary.

 

Dull.

 

He’s never hated anything more.

 

He gets to keep his Sig, and on the bad nights, he presses it against his temple in the pale imitation of the danger he’d come to breathe by. He wonders if his heart is beating. He puts the Sig back in the lockbox.

 

He keeps the license. No one had asked him for it, so it stays tucked away in his old wallet. Just in case.

 

Xx

 

His leg heals completely, there is a scar, but it does not hinder motion.

 

He limps anyway.

 

Xx

 

He doesn’t spend his extravagant pension.

 

He buys for himself what he would be able to as a discharged Captain, which is what the records say, and visits the therapist that will never understand why he limps and why he doesn’t care for water or cement.

 

Xx

 

Bond calls him once, but he doesn’t answer.

 

He never really liked him all that much anyways.

 

Xx

 

He considers speaking to Harry, though they haven’t seen each other in six years now.

 

In the end, of course, he doesn’t.

 

Xx

 

He thinks a lot about reenlisting, but knows they wouldn’t take an invalid.

 

He thinks a lot about the service he’s left, the years he’d given to an agency that didn’t exist.

 

John Watson wants to stop thinking so much.

 

Xx

 

And then there’s Sherlock Holmes, whom he lets borrow his phone while swimming in that hateful fog of memory, where he dances between university and basic training and more than basic training. He barely notices the way he catalogues the paleness of his skin and the way it feels when it brushes against his.

 

“Afghanistan or Iraq?” he asks, and John can see his pale eyes roam him distractedly, uninterested. He is dressed impeccably, and it makes John remember when exquisite suits hugged the hard-packed muscles on his form and made him _Seven_ Continents Watson. Has it only been a year?

 

“Sorry?” John asks, because he honestly hasn’t been paying much attention. Stamford had hauled him bodily up here, prattling on about the time John’s been away. John thinks about the _stories_ he could tell, the looks he could draw on Mike’s face.  

 

The man is thin, elegant and strong looking with icy, pale eyes and wild dark hair. His features are sharp, elfish and John finds himself lost in the keenness of his gaze. It’s like being pinned beneath M’s stare again, only _more_ , and John wonders what he sees.

 

It shoots a thrill down his spine, the same way M did when she gave him a new mission.

 

“Which was it, in Afghanistan or Iraq?” He sounds impatient, and John reorganizes his mental picture. Blindingly, piercingly intelligent, but the social mannerisms of an antisocial two year old. John knows the type, has seen them wander the lower floors of SIS with their fingers dancing over new and improved devices. The Q division had a personality all its own.

 

John answers the way he must, because he is good at what he does, though he does it no longer.

 

“Afghanistan, sorry, how did you know?”

 

A young, mousy woman breezes past him with a cup of coffee in her hands, and John shifts slightly to the left, his hand tightening around his cane before he relaxes again. There is no threat in the arrested way she looks at the dark-haired man.

 

He doesn’t seem to notice her.

 

John feels a stab of empathy for her, and smiles softly as the man insults her without meaning to. He isn’t noticed much these days either.

 

There was a lover in Casablanca that told John he was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen, but it’s been so much time since then, and he wonders if the form beneath the sheets would still invite him in with that coy, dark smile. The starburst scar on his shoulder and the weight on his mind makes him feel like part of the walls.

 

“How do you feel about the violin?” The man’s voice cuts through the tension John doesn’t feel and drags him back to reality. He’s more than mildly surprised this ethereal man still realizes John’s standing there when not even John had.

 

“I’m sorry, what?” John asks, not because he hasn’t heard, but because the only other person to ask him questions like that was M, and it was usually followed by a deep undercover mission. He half expects the man to request him to take on the guise of a violinist protégée in order to stop the mind control of an audience of two million by the composer.

 

“I play the violin when I'm thinking and sometimes I don't talk for days on end. Would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.” His voice resonates somewhere deep down in John, somewhere that echoes and urges him to nod his head and follow him wherever he might lead. It brings color to the room.

 

John’s forgotten all about what he said to Stamford about needing a flat, a piece of truth hidden in a larger lie. He didn’t need a roommate for the money.

 

He could afford anything but being alone anymore. He’d been staring at the Sig much longer these days.

 

“You told him about me?” he asks Mike.

 

“Not a word,” he answers around a smile.

 

“Who said anything about flatmates?” John asks, suppressing the twitch of his lips with the calm ability of a man ten years consumed by acting.

 

“I did. Told Mike this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for. Now here he is just after lunch with an old friend clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan. Wasn't a difficult leap.” He looks so impossibly bored.

 

“How did you know about Afghanistan?”

 

He is suddenly, blindly glad it’s been a year. Any earlier and John was sure this man could pick apart his entire life story, could take one look at him and know about the years he’d spent serving a branch of the government that didn’t exist.

 

“Got my eye on a nice little place in central London. We ought to be able to afford it. We'll meet there tomorrow evening, seven o'clock. Sorry, got to dash. I think I left my riding crop in the mortuary.” And if that isn’t a sentence to remember, John doesn’t know what is. He wants to ask a billion questions, but the one he goes with is bland and boring, even to himself.

 

“Is that it?”

 

“Is that what?” the man asks, clearly annoyed now.

 

John feels distinctly out of place, and misses the smooth slide of silky words whispered in the dark from his mouth. He is not the man he had been. That man’s name was a number.

 

“We’ve only just met and we’re going to go look at a flat?”

 

A case in Monaco two years ago had started similarly, only the woman asking him to move in had been a Russian mafia daughter and John had known it. He doesn’t think this man is dangerous, not to him at least.

 

“Problem?”

 

“We don't know a thing about each other. I don't know where we're meeting; I don't even know your name.” _I have night terrors that wake up my neighbors, I punch the walls when the slowness gets to be too much, I still don’t have a job, I’m twenty nine percent sure that I’m going to crack and become a serial killer soon, I may or may not be vaguely suicidal, and  I’m an international murderer, sorry, spy._

 

“I know you're an Army doctor and you've been invalided home from Afghanistan. You've got a brother worried about you but you won't go to him for help because you don't approve of him, possibly because he's an alcoholic, more likely because he recently walked out on his wife. And I know that your therapist thinks your limp's psychosomatic, quite correctly, I'm afraid. That's enough to be going on with, don't you think?” he passes back John’s phone with an elegant outward flick of his wrist, and John thinks this man is a genius, thinks that even though he’s wrong, he’s the most amazing mind John’s ever had the pleasure to meet.

 

Because he’s wrong in all the right ways, got the story down so beautifully, he didn’t even have to try.

 

He thinks that if this man wanted to, he could find the cracks just as easily, and is blessedly glad that he doesn’t.

 

The man sweeps towards the door, dark curls catching the makeshift breeze and pushing back from his pale face. A smile twitches over his stoic expression, and John is reminded of the existence of his heartbeat.

 

“The name's Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221B Baker Street. Afternoon.”

 

And then he’s gone.

 

And for the first time since he left MI6, John Watson breathes and exhales a smile. 

 

He is alive again.


	2. Live and Let Die

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's taken so long. Working with how much I wanted to keep and what I could skim over has been...impossible for me. Because I want to keep everything to do it justice, but I don't want it to drag anywhere. The next chapter will move significantly faster, I promise.  
> I do hope you guys like it.  
> Comments will make me upload faster, and brighten my day.  
> Thanks for reading!  
> -Han

There are secrets making their way into his skin.

 

They’re made of oil lamps and horse drawn carriages, old revolvers and cobblestone and John likes to think they taste like factory smoke and pipes.

 

But there is nothing on this street but a Speedy’s, two parked cars, and the flat he has come to agree to.

 

His things are already packed.

 

John’s cane is cumbersome, his stride imperfect, but he feels cradled here. Lulled by some old majesty, a quiet blue heron of elegance that curves itself over this single street in protection. Baker Street is a piece of another century, held so carefully in his own.

 

He feels like he is stealing from it, as he finds 221b and breathes in London evening, which almost nothing else can compare to. Like he is taking bits of it apart with his fingertips without realizing it.

 

The colors are beginning to paint the sky, unseen beyond a veil of light grey that leaves it feeling earlier than it is. When night comes, it will be a shock. A blink and the lights go out.

 

It isn’t like that anywhere but London.

 

A taxi pulls to a stop in front of him, and John tries to force himself out of parade rest to appear more casual, but there are few things about the army you can ever really leave behind. And he accepts that.

 

He was twenty four when he thought it was a smart idea to join up, naïve and young and on an adrenaline high that carried him across continents. He is thirty seven when he thinks it is just as intelligent to pack away his things and decide to move in with a man he doesn’t know.

 

Not much has changed, and he wonders if things ever really do.

 

There is drama clinging to the thick fabric of Sherlock’s coat, it swirls around him elegantly as he steps out of the cab and comes to stand in front of him. His hair is kicked up by the wind, a mass of curls snarled around his white skin and pale eyes.

 

“Hello.”

 

John doesn’t think he’s ever heard a voice like that, a baritone the consistency of smoke that seems designed to invade the smallest of places inside your own head.

 

“Ah, Mr. Holmes,” John greets brightly, turning a warm smile on the man that seems to catch him off guard.

 

“Sherlock, please.” He says it warmly, less blasé.

 

He thinks that the small smile turned on him is rare, by the set of the taller man’s shoulders and the stern, posh way he seems to look down at everything else.

 

“Well this is a prime spot. Must be expensive,” John observes. He’s already decided to dip into his considerable pension if need arises.

 

“Mrs. Hudson, the landlady--she's given me a special deal,” Sherlock states almost proudly, “Owes me a favour. A few years back, her husband got himself sentenced to death in Florida. I was able to help out.”

 

Words dry in his mouth, fall off the edge of an edgeless world and curl, dwindling in airless space like paper planes that went up too far. He is curling over himself, trying to find his bearings in a moment of wide-eyed shock that leaves him wanting to smile.

 

It’s like waking up.

 

“Sorry—you stopped her husband being executed?”

 

It has grown late without John noticing, his life. Pieces of it have been swept away and lost in the interims between moonlight sonatas, river flowing inside him caught up in the gunfire and the sound of music filtering through open galas under the stars. The times when there is nothing but the waiting, the grey that has swept him up entirely.

 

John wonders when he’d grown so old, knows this past year carries the blame.

 

There are new lines on his face, he limps; he feels broken by the weight of this world. But.

 

Breathe.

 

There is a certain way John reacts to missions, excitement, clippings in the news, a blasé reference to involvement in the prison system.

 

His heart beats faster.

 

“Oh no,” Sherlock drawls around a low, deep chuckle. “I ensured it.”

 

“He deserve it?”

 

It slips from him before he has a chance to reign it in, blames the cold quiet silence of the street for making him feel too much at home. Sherlock’s light eyes--the color of fog, John decides—widen in something that is almost surprise and warm to what is almost pleasure.

 

Colors are being pulled from the center of John’s chest, reds and blues and purples and oranges the colors of sunsets and noon skies and the Mediterranean and all the bits of him that have been sleeping blink languidly, stretch their limbs, and ask John is they are needed.

 

Murderous intent and adrenaline junkie and crack shot and everything else, like it had never left.

 

He doesn’t know the answer, but when Sherlock gives a snake-like smirk and says, “Oh, I assure you” John thinks he might.

 

Xx

 

Mrs. Hudson looks a lot like M.

 

But instead of visibly cataloging him, cold and strong voice echoing in his mind, she hugs Sherlock as a mother might and looks at John warmly and calls him ‘Dr. Watson.’

 

When she leads them inside, John follows.

 

Xx

 

There are seventeen steps inside, and the old house breathes down the back of his neck and it’s nice.

 

It’s like days blurring into one, time meaningless and un-constituted within these walls.

 

He likes that.

 

Xx

 

John’s first thoughts might have been any number of things.

 

It could be that the room is packed and dusty, or that the walls are a purple Victorian print wallpaper, or that there are four cameras hidden behind stacks of books and sheet music, or that a violin case in the corner looks pristine and tranquil in the dying light, or that there’s a faint chemical smell coming from the kitchen. 

 

Instead he thinks _Welcome Home._

 

Xx

 

At any given moment, John Watson carries his wallet, his sister’s cell phone, a watch with a small compartment in the band, a photo of a villa in Casablanca, a Taylor Brands SWMP3BS Smith and Wesson Military issue knife, a lock pick, and dental floss which is not dental floss. He carries his wit and keen assessments in the back of his head and his numbers make a kind of would-be bulletproof vest across his skin.

 

None of this comes in handy when he deals with Sherlock Holmes.

 

He doesn’t even try.

 

He says, “Well this is very nice, very nice indeed.” And what he means is _Is that a skull on the mantelpiece?_

 

Sherlock agrees and John doesn’t want there to be silence. Says, “Tight fit for my things” at the same time Sherlock announces “So I went straight ahead and moved in.” And what John meant was _When can I move my two boxes in?_ but he doesn’t think Sherlock hears it that way.

 

His voice is quick, a stumbling of words over themselves like they’re caught somewhere too far away to reach. Distracted, but present. “Obviously I can, erm, straighten things up a bit.” He moves as he speaks, too lean and too tall, papers are scattered and shuffled, essays and music bars mingling and a letter opener finds a new home stabbed with impressive force into the mantelpiece.

 

John thinks this is him trying.

 

“That’s a skull,” he remarks casually, the only thing he can think to say.

 

It seems to rest easier on the other man than anything else he could have said.

 

“Friend of mine,” Sherlock answers absently, his fingers skimming across his pocket, feeling for a text. His eyes flick back to John. “Well, I say friend…”

 

John smiles.

 

Xx

 

Sherlock finally slips out of his ridiculously dramatic coat when Mrs. Hudson asks if they need two rooms.

 

There have been too many times in John’s life where the person at his side is a stranger and he still says ‘no, we won’t’ with a smirk and a casual touch against the lower back.

 

But John doesn’t have HQ hissing in his ear, and Sherlock is looking at him again, pale calculating eyes, and John Watson isn’t on mission and there are no expectations and he—

 

He just wants a friend.

 

“Of course we’ll be needing two.”

 

Xx

 

“I looked you up on the internet last night,” John mentions from the arm chair he has already deemed his own.

 

“Anything interesting?” He sounds bored, and John wonders if he is boring.

 

No one has ever told him so.

 

“Found your website. The Science of Deduction?”

_Brilliant._

 

Sherlock turns from his laptop, soft grey light hits him in sheets that make him seems almost translucent. A smug smile curves his lips, and John doubts he’s ever seen a more self-satisfied person.

 

“What did you think?”

 

“You said you could identify a software designer by his tie and an airline pilot by his left thumb?” John asks, because he knows the answer is yes. Because he’s looking for an explanation Sherlock Holmes seems averse to giving.

 

“Yes. And I can read your military career in your face and your leg, and your brother's drinking habits on your mobile phone,” he says, and he sounds both bored and like he wants to prove something.

 

“How?”

 

He goes unanswered.

 

Xx

 

There is casual talk about suicides, three in the papers—“ _Four. There’s been a fourth_ ”—and Mrs. Hudson talks about them like they’re a guilty indulgence of Sherlock’s, like biscuits or cream cake.

 

It’s mildly concerning.

 

Xx

 

John Watson recognizes Greg Lestrade; had received passing mention of a man rising in the ranks of Scotland Yard, brought up in routine leak investigation and quickly dismissed.

 

He wonders if he ever did get Detective Inspector.

 

He deserves it, from what John can remember of his record.

 

The older man surges into the room with desperation written into the lines on his face. His hair has grown more silver and circles stand out beneath his eyes.

 

“Where?” Sherlock asks, no preamble, his brow furrowed in thought.

 

“Brixton, Lauriston Gardens.”

 

His voice is care worn and strained with too many long nights and not enough coffee, and John wonders absurdly if he should offer tea. But they have his attention; have him caught on the edge of a burst of white-light that tastes just like mission days, field work and sweat and explosions.

 

John Watson feels he has faded into his arm chair.

 

If you’d told him two years ago that he’d be part of the furniture in any room, he’d have laughed at you and downed another scotch.

 

“What's new about this one? You wouldn't have come to me otherwise,” Sherlock observes, and his voice sounds restrained to John, reeled in. Trying to appear blasé, uncaring, but the interest burns just beneath his translucent skin and he can see it too easily from his chair. It’s like a trail of fire on Sherlock’s veins visible to just him in the fading light.

 

“You know how they never leave notes?” Lestrade asks, but it doesn’t sound like a question.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“This one did.” he looks as threadbare as the Persian carpet beneath his feet, and so miserably out of place in the cluttered mess that is 221B that John can’t imagine he’s what Sherlock would consider a friend. “Will you come?”

 

There are pieces of John that have forgotten how to stay in one place.

 

His eyes do not know where to roam any longer, but they catch on dust motes and garish wallpaper and cameras hiding in the upper windowsill and the side of Sherlock’s face as he volleys with a police officer about forensics and assistants and someone named Anderson who causes a look of disgust to mar the thin man’s expression.

 

John twitches, fidgets with the loose threads of his jumper and tries not to intrude.

 

But he aches for something he can’t quite name.

 

They’re still talking, but their conversation sounds both rehearsed and cyclical. An argument they’d had before, one with no resolution. Anderson was not Sherlock’s assistant, Sherlock needed an assistant, Lestrade needed Sherlock, Anderson worked for Lestrade.

 

“Will you come?” Lestrade asks, again.

 

“Not in a police car,” Sherlock scoffs at the very idea. “I’ll be right behind.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

Xx

 

It was like an explosion, the way he moved.

 

It was like music pouring from his fingertips, like light had suddenly been given texture, the way Sherlock stepped casually towards the door and broke half-way through the movement into a leap for ever loving _joy._

 

Manic energy enfolded him in a rush of adrenaline and the deep, pleased note of his voice

 

“ _Brilliant! Ah,_ yes!” Sherlock crowed, twisting elegantly as his pale eyes traced words and facts and figures only he could see. “Four serial suicides, and now a note? _Oh, it's Christmas_!”

 

His coat materializes from the collection of papers and books and he slides into it eagerly, a blinding smile illuminating his sharp face. “Mrs. Hudson, I'll be late. Might need some food.”

 

“I'm your landlady, dear, not your housekeeper,” she says kindly.

 

John is either enraptured, or in a state of shock.

 

It was hard to tell, with the way Sherlock’s coat billows behind him as he breezes in and out of the kitchen with swarming energy and life carried with him. His scarf is draped, untied, around his neck and he looks harried and ecstatic and _alive_ all at once. “Something cold will do. John, have a cup of tea, make yourself at home. Don't wait up!”

 

And he’s gone.

 

Xx

 

The quiet he leaves behind him is deafening.

 

Xx

 

Mrs. Hudson looks a lot like M, but her hand was warm on his shoulder as calls him the ‘sitting down type’ and tells him she’ll make him a cuppa while he rests his leg.

 

“ _Damn my leg!_ ” he shouts, nearly screams. She jumps. He apologizes.

 

He doesn’t mean it.

 

Xx

 

He hates the way he misses it, the almost dying, the adrenaline, the fear.

 

Hates that the nightmares are almost a blessing because they’re the only way he feels them, the only reason he hasn’t eaten his gun already.

 

Hates that sitting in 221B Baker Street itches under his skin and he should have followed Sherlock, for no reason other than to feel the thrum of his heartbeat, fast and insistent one more time.

 

When John is twenty four, he carries a book back laden with medical texts, a hundred dollars in cash, a pencil tucked behind his ear, dental floss that is actually dental floss, seventeen hours without sleep, and a cup of black, unsweetened coffee.

 

He is almost hit by a car.

 

He drops his coffee and his book bag, his pencil finds its way to the street sometime in between when he realizes the car is coming and when he manages to get out of the way and very nearly pisses himself.

 

When the brake lights round a corner and the car is gone, John Watson laughs, breathless and free into the night, his hot breath turning the air into foggy smoke that curls in tendrils away from his lips. His shirt has come un-tucked, and his books are fanned out across the street in a littering of highlighted notes and memos to himself. His heart is hammering in his chest, and he feels like lightning has been shot into his veins, like someone has hammered down on his chest with nothing but adrenaline and is this what drug addicts feel like?

 

He feels alive.

 

He loves it.

 

He joins the military when he graduates four months later.

 

He knows himself well enough by now to be able to admit the hard things that no one wants to hear out loud: suicide, murder, intrigue, espionage, explosions, gunshots, and tasting death were his drugs.

 

And John H. Watson was an addict.

 

Xx

 

A long, long time ago, things started like this:

 

“ _Alright boys, lace your shoes and take off the training wheels, we’re out of Kabul and the back end of Bamian by 22:00, that’s a hundred kilometer’s from running water and I don’t want to hear a damn word of complaint, we clear?” John asks cheerfully. “McNair, what’s the weather like today?”_

_“Moderate to high Taliban, 45% chance of IED impact in the last twenty kilometers. Also sunny.”_

_His boys groan, sweating beneath body armor and a layer of sand. Their guns had become their limbs, and the evac helicopter their god. Four of them are new blood, but he is used to this life. John grins, his heartbeat a pleasant thrum in his chest._

_“Just another beautiful day in paradise, then. Move out!”_

 

But these days, it’s something different.

 

It’s Sherlock suddenly back, his hair in disarray but his face a smooth mask of considering calm.

 

"You're a doctor. In fact you're an Army doctor,” Sherlock observes slowly, tasting the words in his mouth.

 

“Yes.” _Among other things_ goes unsaid in the back of his mind.

 

“Any good?” Sherlock asks, as if John would never tell him anything less than the truth.

 

And the truth is that MI6 never gave him the chance to fall out of practice, his hands are still a surgeon’s; the calluses remain. Scars and nicks and cuts and burns that fold together to make a killer that heals. He’s always liked the paradox, if he’s honest. 

 

He stands.

 

“Very good.”

 

“Seen a lot of injuries, then. Violent deaths,” Sherlock observes calmly, stepping closer until John is almost uncomfortable.

 

“Well, yes.”

 

The air around them is thick with an ignored tension, and John imagines it’s the dust that makes it harder to breathe.

 

“Bit of trouble too, I bet?”

 

And John sees IEDs bursting a second sun through a man’s leg, a man in Uzbekistan who tries to inject him with the bubonic plague, a mafia daughter who tries to shoot him mid-coitus, terracotta roof tiles that blur beneath a motorbike in Istanbul, weightlessness as he jumps from a helicopter in Tokyo.

 

Says, “Of course. Yes. Enough for a lifetime, far too much.”

 

It seems to be the right thing to say.

 

A smile curves Sherlock’s lips in a secret way, something that doesn’t belong to anyone else. Lives for this moment, when he looks down at John, an invalid from Afghanistan with a limp that isn’t real and nightmares that are, and asks the question John had been waiting for, for over a year.

 

“Want to see some more?”

 

“Oh god, _yes_.”

 

Xx

 

John rejects tea on the way out, his voice too happy as he says he’s going out.

 

“Both of you?” Mrs. Hudson asks, incredulous. So very close to shocked.

 

“Impossible suicides? Four of them? No point sitting at home when there's finally something _fun_ going on!” Sherlock says, voice wild and eyes burning. He kisses Mrs. Hudson’s cheek goodbye and spins away, his moves graceful and dance-like.

 

There’s a sort of manic violence in the way he moves through the short hallway, an inferno of frenzied glee that drags John forward, a divine exhilaration in his voice, like a man finding god or falling in love or taking a sweet, glorious hit after too long without.

 

 “ _The game, Mrs. Hudson, is on_!”

 

Xx

 

Night has settled over the city, and it’s like some god has turned off the lights. The sun is smothered out so quickly. The lights swim past John’s eyes, a spark, a flash, and he feels like he’s underwater. Drifting inside the grip of London with a _consulting detective_ who speaks too fast with pale eyes flitting over every inch of his body and John’s never felt this exposed before.

 

“You’ve got a psychosomatic limp, of course you’ve got a therapist,” Sherlock says, and John fights a smile.

 

John wants to let the river in, this place they’re floating in, until it fills every secret crevice in his body and makes him foggy and dream-like. He wants to be carried away with the current. He wants to drown himself in the quick baritone that washes over his senses in a way unlike anything else.

 

Sherlock Holmes takes up so much space, it’s like he has to dominate his little world or he’ll disappear completely.

 

“The police don’t consult amateurs,” Sherlock says to finish, and John doesn’t think about what’s missing, or what’s wrong; the gaps in the story are meant to be there.

 

John nods to himself, his fingers dancing on the grip of his cane and says casually, “That was…amazing.”

 

Sherlock looks floored, he blinks. “You think so?”

 

“Of course it was,” John says quickly. “It was extraordinary, it was quite extraordinary.”

 

“That’s not what people normally say.”

 

John is reminded of a small child, jarringly. And he wants to soothe whatever parts of him are suffering, whatever parts of him have been told he’s not good enough, have called him a freak. He’s like that a lot, if he’s honest, and it’s gotten him in trouble before. Enough trouble that he’s stopped caring about the consequences.

 

“What do they normally say?”

 

“Piss off,” Sherlock says shortly.

 

John laughs.

 

Xx

 

“Did I get anything wrong?” Sherlock asks as they step out of the taxi and John leans again on his cane.

_Not so much what you got wrong as what was left out. The gaping holes that stretch a full ten years between here and Afghanistan, or, before the last mission. The life I let consume me. You don’t know about my job or my number or that damned compound or how long I was held, or how long I’ve been back, how I couldn’t see Harry, in the end, and she sent me this phone in the mail and I use it because I miss her._

 

“Harry and me don't get on, never have, Clara and Harry split up three months ago and they're getting a divorce, and Harry is a drinker.”

 

“Spot on, then. I didn't expect to be right about everything.” Only he sounds like he did, smug and proud, as he walks in huge strides towards the flashing lights that paint the street in blue.

 

“Harry’s short for Harriet,” John says brightly.

 

The taller man stops walking. “Harry’s your sister,” Sherlock echoes in a monotone.

 

“Look, what exactly am I doing here?”

 

“ _Sister!_ ”

 

“No—seriously, what am I doing here?”

 

“There’s always something!”

 

Xx

 

“Hello, freak,” a mocha skinned woman calls out. John thinks she’s beautiful, in a conventional way.

 

He doesn’t like her much; the smooth lines of her face are pinched in a sour look as she glances over the consulting detective and the greeting seems to be anything but an endearment. 

 

“I'm here to see Detective Inspector Lestrade,” Sherlock announces without preamble.

 

John resists a smile; Lestrade had certainly deserved the position, if his memory serves him.

 

“Why?” the woman demands.

 

Sherlock rolls his eyes, “I was invited.”

 

“Why?”

 

“I think he wants me to take a look,” he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm and John finds it almost impossible to contain his chuckle at the bitter look the woman’s face takes.

 

“Well, you know what I think, don't you?” she asks derisively, her hands falling to her hips.

 

“Always Sally.” He inhales, makes a face, and paints a smile on his face that is almost painful to witness. “I even know you didn't make it home last night.” He ducks beneath the police tape and straightens again in one fluid movement.

 

John isn’t sure if he should be amused or irritated by the way Sergeant Donovan and Anderson treat Sherlock, is about to say something to get them to stop looking at the detective like he’s an ignorant two year old, when the man himself launches into a short diatribe about the affair the two of them are having, ending with a terse: “And I assume she scrubbed your floors, going by the state of her knees.” John isn’t sure how he holds a straight face as he follows Sherlock into the crime scene, but he does.

 

He does take a pointed look at Donovan’s knees and says, “You could do better” as he passes her.

 

John slips into his blue suit for the first time in his long career at crime scenes. It’s uncomfortable, catches on his wooly jumper and creates an annoying static charge.

 

Next time, he’ll refuse it in the same way Sherlock does.

 

(He steadfastly refuses to think about how he assumes there will be a next time.)

 

Xx

 

There are too many stairs here, John hates stairs.

 

According to Lestrade, the victim’s name is Jennifer Wilson and she’s not been here long.

 

John’s leg screams at him in foreign languages, he ignores it.

 

Xx 

 

The woman on the floor makes memories flash before John’s eyes, and he wonders if he looks too comfortable here, hanging just by the door as Sherlock descends on her, runs gloved fingertips over her hot pink attire and flashes a magnifying glass over her hands and neck.

 

The room is almost too cold, a chill hovers uncomfortably against John’s skin, and it makes him look just a touch less casual. Which he thinks is good.

 

“Got anything?” Lestrade asks, when Sherlock stands and shucks his latex gloves.

 

“Not much,” he says with a smirk that’s meant to communicate _more than enough_.

 

Anderson is leaning against the door, his pinched face in a haughty expression of superiority as he says, “She's German. _Rache_. It's German for revenge--”

 

 “Your pronunciation is horrible,” John cuts him off mildly.

 

Sherlock shoots him an unreadable look, something that might be surprise and might be consideration, as he shuts the door on Anderson’s face. He tells them the woman is from Cardiff, says it’s obvious, and pushes John towards the body and tells him to draw his own conclusions.

 

He kneels, his cane thunking to the ground as he drops it, and manually drags his leg back. He can feel the scar pull uncomfortably, winces, and looks up at Sherlock.

 

“What am I doing here?”

 

“Helping me make a point,” Sherlock whispers, steepling his fingers in front of his mouth.

 

John rolls his eyes, lowering himself to the woman’s level, grumbling under his breath. “Too old for this… _retired_ …” And he almost hopes Sherlock hears him, and jumps to conclusion. His latex catches on her hands, dirty ring, he inhales vomit and _J’adore_ perfume, the outfit is absurdly loud, and he has no idea how Sherlock knows she’s from Cardiff.

 

He sits back.

 

“Asphyxiation, passed out and choked on her own vomit. One of the worst ways to go, if you ask me. Aside from that, she’s an adulterer, serial, and judging from the outfit, either in the media or very wealthy,” he says calmly, already thinking about the easiest way to stand up.

 

Sherlock is looking at him, really looking at him. It’s as if John’s just started existing, as if he now occupies space in Sherlock’s mind, as if he said something so flooring he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

 

“What?” John asks, and tries not to feel like he’s under a microscope.

 

“How on earth did you know that?” Sherlock asks, and his voice is hushed, his eyes are piercing.

 

“Well, Asphyxiation---”

 

“No, not that! The rest,” Sherlock demands, leaning forward over the body, his pale eyes wild and keen on every facet of John’s face, a single dark curl catching on his fluttering eyelashes. “How did you know?”

 

“Her wedding ring’s dirty, but she’s clearly not careless when it comes to her appearance, so she didn’t care. And her perfume,” he answers quickly, wondering if he’s saying the right thing.

 

“Perfume?” Lestrade voices, hesitant as he steps forward slightly.

 

John nods, a reminiscent smile sweeping over his face. “ _J’adore_ Dior, it’s the number one perfume for cheating wives. Never met a woman wearing it who wasn’t, as a matter of fact.”

 

Sherlock grins, and suddenly he’s gripping John’s shoulders, hard. It sends a spike of pain through him the bullet wound screaming at his body. He flinches. The detective doesn’t seem to notice. “ _And the media?_ ” He asks, his voice breathless and excited.

 

“That’s not become a _normal_ color for people to wear while I’ve been gone, has it?” John asks instead of answering, eyeing the jarring shade of pink.

 

“Oh you are going to be so much _fun_!” Sherlock says brightly, standing up with a flourish.

 

“Good lord, there’s two of them,” Lestrade mutters, massaging his temples.

 

“Oh I wouldn’t say that. He did miss almost everything of importance,” he says absently, before launching bodily into a deconstruction of Jennifer Wilson’s life, the weather in Cardiff, the splash pattern on her right heel and calf that means she had a suitcase that no one can find.

 

And John’s saying things like ‘Brilliant’ and ‘Amazing’ and ‘Fantastic’ and he can’t help and he doesn’t think he can stop (he’s glad Sherlock doesn’t seem to mind) because it’s like watching the pieces clash and morph and run at each other from opposite ends of the earth to slot together so perfectly, manipulated by his thin, pale fingers. John’s never seen anything like it, the way Sherlock’s whole body seems to move through the deductions with him, his face brightening and souring with each fact that crosses his lips.

 

How he looks stunned by John and Lestrade’s stupidity when they stare blankly at him for too long, he’s half way down the stairs muttering about how much he loves serial killers and John is trying and failing to restrain a smile.

 

The energy he carries is infectious, and he feels ready for anything and his heartbeat is deafening

 

“Her case! Come on, where is her case? _Did she eat it_? Someone else was here, and they took her case. So the killer must have driven here. Forgot the case was in the car.” He sounds like he’s thinking out loud, running down avenues of thought he’s only considering as the turns come up, dashing down them without second thought and voicing them to the air in a way that seems to jar Lestrade just the slightest.

 

“She could’ve checked into a hotel, left it there?” John asks, because Sherlock seems to require an answer, leaning over the stairwell to make sure he’s heard.

 

“No, look at her hair. She color-coordinates her lipstick and her shoes. She'd never have left any hotel with her hair still looking...Oh _...Oh!_ ” He says, his hands up and framing his face in an expression of realization and eagerness.

 

“What? Sherlock, what is it?” Lestrade asks, irate.

 

His voice rebounds off of the walls and echoes down the stairs.

 

“Serial killers, always hard. You have to wait for them to make a mistake.”

 

“We can’t just wait!” Lestrade shouts.

 

“Oh, we're done waiting. Look at her, really look! _Houston, we have a mistake._ Get on to Cardiff. Find out who Jennifer Wilson's family and friends were. Find Rachel!” Sherlock shouts as he rushes down the stairs

 

“Of course, yeah-- _but what mistake_?” Lestrade calls, and Sherlock whirls back into view, stares straight up and bellows so loudly John could picture it shaking the shoddy house.

 

“ _Pink_!”

 

Xx

 

By the time John gets downstairs, Sherlock is long gone.

 

Donovan warns him away, calls the detective a psychopath, a freak.

 

John stays silent.

 

She says to stay away from him.

 

John won’t.

 

Xx

 

He limps his way down the street for a cab, and the CCTV follows him.

 

Phones ring.

 

He huffs, wishes he’d brought his Sig, and answers.

 

“Alright, who’s it this time? Russian mafia? Uzbekistan smuggling ring? Terrorists? Those blokes from Peru—because I did apologize for that. Go on, speak up, I’m not particularly in the mood for this,” he snaps down the line, his leg burning and his shoulder aching and he’s tired and left behind and trying very, _very_ hard not to be hateful.

 

“There is a security camera on the building to your left. Do you see it?” a posh voice answers.

 

“I don’t care about the bloody camera. Just bring your car round and I’ll get in and we can discuss whatever you clearly want to discuss.”

 

And he hangs up.

 

He gets in the car, asks for the woman’s name, she answers Anthea, he’s knows it’s not real.

 

They drive on.

 

It’s just like the good old days.

 

Xx

 

In an overly dramatic empty carpark, a middle aged man with a pleasant face and a black umbrella waits in a pool of light. John limps his way towards him, refuses a seat, and wonders if he should be reaching for his exploding dental floss or his knife.

 

“This is all very clever, wonderfully dramatic, but you could’ve just as easily phoned me. On my phone,” he says agreeably, settling more comfortably on his uninjured leg.

 

“When one is avoiding the attention of Sherlock Holmes, one learns to be discreet, hence this place. Your leg must be hurting you. Sit down,” the man offers.

 

So, not about him.

 

John relaxes.

 

“I don’t want to sit down.”

 

"You don’t seem very afraid,” the man notes.

 

“You don’t seem very frightening.”

 

The man tells him he’s a stupid soldier, in so many words, and John guesses government, guesses he doesn’t know how well his record has been hidden, guesses that this man can only assume things about him. He wishes he hadn’t slipped on the phone.

 

“I am the closest thing to a friend that Sherlock Holmes is capable of having,” the man says blandly, obviously still wondering what makes John special enough to blend so completely into Sherlock’s life in less than five hours.

 

As if John knows the answer.

 

“And what’s that?”

 

“An enemy.”

 

John snorts, he can’t help it. He’s more comfortable here than he is at Tesco’s, and his left hand isn’t shaking. He feels put together, like all the cracks and splinters in him have been repaired.

 

“In his mind, certainly. If you were to ask him, he'd probably say his arch-enemy. He does love to be dramatic,” the man continues.

 

John takes a pointed look around, eyeing the eerie lot and the perfectly placed pools of light and uncomfortable looking chair. “Oh thank god _you’re_ above all that.”

 

The man ignores him.

 

He offers money to watch Sherlock.

 

John refuses.

 

He doesn’t work for anyone anymore. Says as much.

 

“You’re very loyal, very quickly,” he comments, and John laughs and laughs. He gets three texts in quick succession.

 

_Come at once if convenient._

_If inconvenient come anyway._

 

The man looks at him like he’s insane.

_Could be dangerous._

 

He’s about to leave, after the posh man points out the intermittent tremor that’s mysteriously vanished and tells him to fire his therapist. John is very suddenly tired, and the years have worn him well, drawn him thin at the seams and worn at the creases.

 

But he feels more alive than he has in months, years. Since that first mission with the blast that shook the earth and made John feel both small and impossibly large all at once. He feels caught in the wind, in the heat that comes from a flash of endless light. In everything.

 

He likes it.

 

“One more thing,” the man says as John’s walking away. “What did they call you?”

 

He looks smug, like he’s picked apart some impossibly hard puzzle. Not like John didn’t give himself away the moment he snapped into a phone box about the mafia and terrorists and  smugglers.

 

John turns back, the light catching on his face and making him look years and years younger. A twenty something Casanova with blonde hair and blue eyes and a caring, kind face. Slim body hid beneath a wooly jumper and a cane he knows how to kill a man with at least four different ways.

 

The night is dark and the chill settles sweet and sharp on his bones, and his smile is reminiscent, cocky. The pieces of him that had been scattered in a compound in Afghanistan are sliding back into place.

 

He feels at home.

 

“Watson, John Watson. Agent 003.”


	3. The World is Not Enough

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO sorry I've been gone so long. At first my computer crashed and I had to get a new hard drive and then I kind of lost interest for a while but I'm back, I promise.  
> I'm already working on the next chapter.  
> Please please please comment, it makes my whole life.  
> On a side note, because sometimes I feel the need to brag to the internet who, for some reason, actually reads what I have to say  
> I WON A SILVER MEDAL IN NATIONAL SCHOLASTIC FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER. THIS IS A BIG DEAL. I'M GOING TO CARNEGIE HALL.   
> -ahem-  
> This is shorter than usual, but I'll make it up to you by posting again no later than Saturday.  
> Thanks a bunch for reading!

Sometimes John thinks he’s being burned alive—a slow, raw fire that catches on his veins and licks into all the hidden places in his body, where he keeps his secrets and his dreams.

 

It’s like hell’s been injected behind his eyes, until the world is framed by a sea of twisting oranges and reds, the sun concentrated on his heartbeat. It’s like lightning prolonged, stretched out by invisible hands and drawn through him in aching waves and ripples.

 

He feels like that when he tucks his Sig into the carefully hidden holster on the inside lining of his jacket, after he texts a serial killer and stares at a pink suitcase and learns Sherlock’s _years_ ahead of the police. Decades from John, it seems.

 

He meets the detective by the cab, fingering the plastic case of dental-floss-not-dental-floss in his pocket distractedly as the city lights blur by him.

 

The rest of the world is foggy, and his chest hums with a fire he’s _missed_.

 

Xx

 

They end up walking part of the way, and John watches his breath before him as they move up Northumberland. His cane puts him a half-step behind Sherlock.

 

London smells like home, and it swirls and glides across him, kisses him sweetly with memories of wandering in between missions. Of tripping and falling into pipe-smoke history and iron-statued ghosts.

 

He watches Sherlock watch the street, pale eyes roaming faces and scuffs on shoes and brands of chewing gum and umbrellas and tourist maps and laughing couples and coffee cups.

 

“This is his hunting ground,” he says softly, reverently. John wonders what it must be like in his head, organized or chaos or painful to see. Wonders if this is what it takes to keep him from ripping at the seams. “Right here in the heart of the city. Now that we know his victims were abducted, that changes everything. Because all of his victims disappeared from busy streets, crowded places, but nobody saw them go. _Think!_ Who do we trust, even though we don't know them? Who passes unnoticed wherever they go? Who hunts in the middle of a crowd?”

 

John chuckles to himself. “Spies?”

 

He still thinks it’s funny, even when Sherlock rolls his eyes and pointedly doesn’t respond.

 

Xx

 

 In Casablanca there was a smoothness to John’s words, a heat to them that could only come from practice and lies. Where the act he wore sunk into his skin and there was a deviousness that lingered in his blue eyes. Where the moonlight made his skin glow a soft pale and his fingers traced out patterns on a lover’s skin. Where he loved slow and long and controlled, because it was his job.

 

But this isn’t that.

 

This isn’t that man.

 

This is John Watson, clumsily trying to break through the marble exterior of his new flatmate. This is John asking what he should expect, what part he should be playing. This is John stumbling, falling into “You're unattached. Like me. Fine. Good.” and meaning ‘I’m just so glad not to be in that shitty bedsit, you can fuck whoever you want.’ Meaning: ‘I’m glad there’s no one because people have begun to frighten me. Have begun to make me feel trapped beneath a microscope slide. Have begun to make me feel pinned.’ Meaning: ‘There’s no one for me either. Never again. Never again.’

 

This is John’s face heating in the candlelight, a blush eating at his cheeks.

 

This is John being told that Sherlock is not interested, as if John had interest to give. As if he were not hollow and aching still, from an act years ago he let become reality, from a lover with a knife tucked underneath their pillow. As if John was not just starting to wake up, blink into the light like a newborn, mouth moving to assure that “I’m not asking!”

 

But it’s all fine.

 

Of course it’s all fine.

 

And if John’s eyes linger on the shadows Sherlock’s cheekbones cast, if he thinks about the taste of marble, it’s a passing, compulsory thing. It’s fleeting.

 

It’s nothing more than a brush of hummingbird’s wings across his skin.

 

And that’s all fine.

 

Xx

 

When they run, it’s a bit like falling.

 

There’s the rush of air and the darkness blurred through with cab lights and the feeling of losing yourself. John is being carried away on the wind, and so is London.

 

There’s just him and the way Sherlock’s coat snaps with his movements, a giant charcoal bird.

 

There’s just his stomach in his throat and the reach for his gun and the insane urge to steal a motorcycle and ride across the tops of the buildings.

 

His heart is beating so fast.

 

He follows Sherlock down back roads, alleyways lined with scum and graffiti swear words and broken needles and all the things no one likes to think about. They take twists into oncoming traffic, feel themselves burning from the inside out, breathing hard in swells of mist. They move like the world is ending, like it’s crashing down around them in hails of fire and bullets.

 

Like they are on the run.

 

Headlights make the world swim in front of John, but the cab stops. Sherlock doesn’t seem like he’s run at all, statuesque and calm, and John falls into military bearing. The hard-packed muscle on his short frame hasn’t diminished in a year, he hasn’t let it.

 

It’s not the murderer, just a confused tourist; the night is cold around them. Wrong country, good alibi.

 

“What?” Sherlock asks defensively as the cab speeds away, as if he’s being made fun of.

 

John snorts around a chuckle and recalls the look on the stunned man from America when Sherlock pulled out a police ID. “Nothing just—‘Welcome to London’.”

 

They laugh into the darkness, wild and alive.

 

Xx

 

John’s forgotten his cane.

 

He breathes.

 

He smiles.

 

Xx

 

The thing about Sherlock is that the first two fingers on his right hand twitch when people talk about drugs.

 

That’s the only break in his control, a soft thrumming against his leg or on the inside of his coat pocket that John only sees because he doesn’t know what else to focus on. Because the flat he’s just agreed to is being turned upside out, ripped at the seams by Scotland Yard’s finest. The smell of lab equipment lingers like smoke from the kitchen.

 

The people packed tight into the cramped room are all breathing at once, bitter words that bite down into his skin leaking from their mouths and it’s like they forget that Sherlock is the only one who can provide the answers, the only one who can stop this.

 

It’s like they forget.

 

And John hates it.

 

Xx

 

The absence of Sherlock Holmes amplifies a murmur, it makes all of it bigger and impossibly smaller. There is a huge, yawning sort of silence and what’s left of them reaches blindly for the assurance that yes, they are still able to function without him there.

 

The police and Mrs. Hudson trudge and titter and stare vacantly at the door, waiting for him to come back, the tips of their fingers tingling with the promised rush of a conclusion.

 

There were so close they could taste it, pink and warm on the tip of their tongues.

 

It left John blinking, slowly come out of a fog of data and facts the consulting detective had wrapped him in. He was a snake charmed with the energy of the flat, of Sherlock, and the pieces left were uncoiling themselves, shedding their skin.

 

Lestrade sighs loudly beside him, rubbing callused hands over his face as if he could wipe away the fatigue, the frustration. As if taking a moment could make him fluent in Sherlockian, the language of observation.

 

John glances down at his phone, where a GPS site refreshes lazily. He breathes, and feels the weight of his Sig at his back.

 

The red dot blinks lazily at the mouth of Baker Street, moving steadily.

 

The chase is on.

 

Xx

 

 The city throbs around him.

 

London and its breathing parts shift and swarm into his senses as he takes to the streets at a run, the pavement blurring beneath his strides. The streetlights lengthen together into a single bar of endless _go-stop-slow-go-stop_ and he thinks if he listens hard enough, he can hear pieces of himself waking up, shaking themselves off, and diving back into the fray.

 

He holds his phone out in front of him, his eyes trained on a moving signal. His gun is heavy at his back.

 

John swerves, takes a back alley at crushing speeds and races through the grime and trash. The dirty pieces of the city leave impressions on his skin, like smoke finger caresses. This is something he knows, a language he speaks.

 

This is breathing.

 

He’s not going to make it to Sherlock in time, he’s moving too fast and John doesn’t have the patience to flag down a taxi. The lightning-spark thrill of being just out of reach rocks through him. The thought of being just at the edge and ready to fall.

 

He sees Sherlock, sharp eyes vacant and empty. Body limp and thrown on the floor at all the wrong angles. He feels numb, his heart slows even as he forces himself faster, his body pushing, leg crying distantly with the phantom whispers of old ghostly pain.

 

His shoulder burns with the memory of hot metal, and there are faces resting behind his eyes. Men and women he couldn’t save, hands reaching and lips parted to form his name, his number.

 

Sherlock wouldn’t become one of them.

 

The clock ticks slowly onwards. He thinks about a small capsule pressed to Sherlock’s lips, about a look of strangled-off fear in his eyes—just the barest hint in the face of death. John’s blood surges through his veins in a redoubling of energy, sparks dancing off his nerves and his lungs burning inside the cage of his flesh.

 

Xx

 

He steals a motorcycle, and learns to fly.

 

London’s sidewalks, peppered with late-night wanderers and streetlamps, are not rooftops. They’re not the terracotta three-story pathways in Istanbul with shots dancing off the tops of smoke-ringed chimneys.

 

But it’s something.

 

Xx

 

John can feel the city scream at him, beg with fingers clawed deep into his skin _runhurryrun_ and he thinks—he thinks it needs the detective. Thinks London wants to keep him close, burrowed deep in the muck and underground. The parts of her no one wants to see, trudging through the sewers and the death to solve the riddles of its pavement.

 

The red dot halts at Roland-Kerr Further Education College on a dark, quiet street.

 

The wind rushes against his face, the screen on his phone blurring with the wetness in his eyes. He takes a sharp right, and feels his body swing low towards the ground, can see the rush of hard, slate pavement blurred into a meat-grinder and stretches to let his cheek nearly kiss the surface. A breath away from a crash, and he pulls himself back up.

 

John Watson laughs into the night.

 

Bond had called it a death wish once, when he was stitching John up in Kazakhstan with nothing but a bottle of vodka to dull the pain. Neither of them pretended it wasn’t, or that it wasn’t something they shared.

 

Three streets away.

 

They are addicts for the breath of _this will be my last_ and _I am still alive_. They are hungry and desperate for the chance to glimpse God behind the clouds and find an answer tucked in the very back of the universe. They’re wringed out and needy for the ecstasy of dying and the relief of life. They’re broken and looking for a fix. They’re stumbling and hazy-eyed to the motions of daily life and they need the knife-edge clarity of a bullet. They need the intimacy of a car wreck, metal warping and twisting obscenely, until they feel like part of a center page Playboy fold out, erotic and viscerally alive.

 

Those are the moments they’ll keep, even if they have to arm wrestle Alzheimer’s for them.

 

Xx

 

But John’s not like Bond.

 

Those aren’t the only moments he steals away.

 

John keeps Evac helicopters and men missing limbs and bullet wounds and the sting of new stitches and the vacant look of dead soldiers and the men he’d found muttering into their shoes—trying to twist dials like a radio.

 

John Watson dreams of blood-spattered sheets and reaching hands and squealing tires and caves and water finding every secret crevice of him. He remembers a shot to the shoulder and what they did to his leg. He remembers _thi_ s _moment_ : when there are two buildings and a taxi parked between them. When there is a choice.

 

When he chooses wrong.

 

Xx

 

He launches himself into the left building, motorcycle tipped and still thrumming angrily on its side, dominant hand and wounded shoulder and that’s a side he knows so well. He takes the stairs at a run and doesn’t feel his leg twitch, tremble, threaten to give way.

 

His hands are steady.

 

And sometimes John thinks he’s being burned alive.

 

Xx

 

There are two panes of glass and a serial killer between John and Sherlock.

 

Two panes of glass and a small pill.

 

Two panes of glass and a flatshare.

 

And a scream he doesn’t hear.

 

And a madman.

 

And an ego.

 

And a lifeline.

 

And a trigger.

 

And a breath.

 

And a shot.

 

Xx

 

All obstacles fall; there is only the blood painting the schoolroom floor and the pill falling away from Sherlock’s open lips and the cold, consuming rush of relief up John’s spine.

 

John melts back into the shadows.

 

He exhales.

 

Xx

 

The reason John was so good at what he did, was that no one knew he was the most dangerous man they would ever meet.

 

He hid it behind jumpers and concerned looks, gently callused hands and blue eyes.

 

No one even considers him for the shot.

 

No one ever did.

 

Until Sherlock Holmes, who meets his eyes across a parking lot, sheathed in an orange shock blanket, and stops mid-sentence. Who visibly connects the dots and looks frozen by the discovery. Who leaps up and is, for a moment, a collection of ungainly limbs and a vibrant blanket.

 

Sherlock, who says, “Good shot.”

 

And it’s like everything falls neatly into place, John can feel something shift and slot with a click into his chest.

 

This is good, this is:

 

“We can’t giggle, it’s a crime scene.”

 

and

 

“Of course both pills were poisoned, haven’t you ever seen _Princess Bride_.”

 

and

 

“The British government is your brother?”

 

And it’s good.

 

And then Sherlock says something.

 

His lips form a word—name—that slips sweetly and easily into reality, snake-like and soft. He says it breathlessly, like it’s a Christmas present.

 

He says it like it’s holy.

 

And something in John’s brain shorts out.

 

Xx

 

Something in him disconnects as he trails behind Sherlock, whose pale eyes have taken back to the street signs and the stars.

 

Away from him.

 

He’s faded back into a background he’s comfortable in.

 

His head pounds.

 

John is at the edge of something.

 

There are three weeks buried there, three long fucking weeks.

 

For long, endless minutes, as they move soundlessly towards the restaurant, there is only the objective. There is only the burning, aching, splitting _need_ to tell M.

 

A business card and a torture chamber swim inside his head.

 

Xx

 

He leaves for the bathroom after they’ve settled in at the Chinese restaurant, dim sum ordered, and his fingers find a number easily. It’s still habitual, ingrained. A part of his genetic makeup, now.

 

“Agent 003 requesting M, mission objective retrieved. Repeat: mission objective retrieved.”

 

“ _John, what the bloody hell--”_

 

He thinks about Sherlock.

 

Smoke-screen eyes burning from the inside out with the same fire that takes him sharp and aching at the heart. Baritone voice caught up in the deduction, in the rambling curve and flow of thoughts that swim before his eyes. Dexterous fingers that can pick apart anyone.

 

He thinks about running, and the texture of wind against his face.

 

He thinks about what it felt like to finally wake up.

 

John thinks about the three weeks M didn’t send help.

 

The next two she didn’t face him.

 

He thinks about Afghanistan and the way the way it felt to choke on his own vomit. The way it felt to be beaten into amnesia.

 

He thinks about being found beneath a canvas of stars at the base of the Hindu Kush.

 

And he thinks about being found in St. Bart’s.

 

John hangs up.

 

He sinks back against the bathroom stall with a sagging, heavy relief that swells up from the very center of him.

 

“Moriarty,” he whispers, voice cracking, because he needs to say it out loud. Because it means something to finally remember.

 

A compound in Afghanistan twists before his eyes, water crashes into his lungs, red iron and acid and a knife paints his leg a new picture, a gunshot makes him weak.

 

John laughs to himself and his leg does not collapse beneath him.

 

He breathes.

 

And he spits out the name like it’s a curse.

 

“Moriarty.”


	4. The Spy Who Loved Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised by Saturday so, here it is!  
> I absolutely adored the response I got last time, so if you want updates this regularly, please please keep it up. It meant a ton.  
> So this is all totally original, and the next will probably be half and half canon and original.  
> Let me know what you guys think!  
> Thank you for reading.  
> -Han

John moves in on a Monday, two boxes tucked under his arms.

 

He wakes in a cave, dreams of it, it is carved into him.

 

When he screams himself awake, Sherlock is playing his violin downstairs, and the music is soft and warm. A lullaby.

 

He goes back to sleep.

 

He does not dream.

 

Xx

 

John finds he doesn’t feel like he is choking on this city, on this life.

 

Not anymore.

 

He is not a ghost captured by a bedsit.

 

He’s home.

 

Xx

 

When he falls asleep on the couch a week later, he knows something has changed.

 

He doesn’t fall asleep in front of anyone, not since the military.

 

Not since Casablanca.

 

But he wakes with Sherlock’s pale, intelligent eyes boring into him like he’s some kind of marvelous experiment, and knows that he is not afraid.

 

Xx

 

M calls on a Friday.

 

John doesn’t pick up.

 

Xx

 

John gets a job.

 

It’s easy, it’s steady, it’s money.

 

He hates it.

 

He does it anyway.

 

The thing about the surgery, is that he can prove to himself he can still heal like he used to. His wounds have robbed him much of his fine motor skills, but he can still operate.

 

Which is something.

 

Sherlock says he takes the job because of the money, and assumes he needs a break from the monumental storm that is him.

 

That isn’t all true.

 

John takes the job because he wants to prove to himself that he can survive when it all goes away. When another retirement is at the brink, when Sherlock grows bored of him, when there are no more criminals to chase, he can’t go back to the way he was.

 

He can’t voice this to Sherlock, so he carries it deep down inside himself, where limps and canes rest in waiting.

 

Xx

 

M calls.

 

Xx

 

They have a case that draws Sherlock bodily into romance.

 

He doesn’t understand what could compel a woman to go on a killing spree for her ex-military lover, murdering everyone from his recruitment officer to the nurses at the Vet clinic he attended and do it all with what she called ‘the burning love in her chest for Jeremy.’

 

John looks on grimly, and calls it love. Twisted and dark, but still love.

 

“Have you ever been in love, then?” Sherlock asks, his fingers steepled and his eyes analytical.

 

“Once,” John says quietly.

 

“Well, _go on_. What does love do to you, that it can compel someone to such lengths?” Disgust rolls off of him in waves.

 

John sips his tea.

 

“It’s not so much what _it_ does. I loved, love did nothing _to_ me.

 

“I loved in-in the softest of touches, like they would break and I would dissolve if we ever really felt each other. I loved in milky twilight in Casablanca, and I compared their eyes to the stars even when I didn’t want to. There was nothing, for a while, but the other person. There was just the way they could make me feel when I was alone in a crowd. There was just the way it felt to kiss them and know I had someone to come back to. There was just them, they were the horizon.”

 

He swallows, and his fingers knead softly into his leg.

 

“It’s encompassing, you drown in it. That’s what love is, drowning in another human being,” he whispers.  “There was a time I would’ve done anything for them. I would have killed; I would have taken down entire nations if I felt like I had to.”

 

He smiles, it’s soft and vulnerable to Sherlock’s eyes.

 

“That sounds…”

 

“Horrible?” John supplies.

 

Sherlock looks at him, and it seems like there are new lines on John’s face, new hidden canyons and sadness and wear. And he wonders where this love went. He’s kept a deliberately vague pronoun, most likely to keep himself distant from the memory because it hurts.

 

He doesn’t like it when John’s hurt.

 

“Yes,” he says slowly, because it makes John grin at him through the sadness and make a joke about his marriage to his work.

 

Sherlock thinks of John as a kind of magician, for a moment.

 

Masking his sadness behind a cheap trick meant to distract the eye.

 

Sherlock doesn’t get distracted.

 

Xx

 

“Why do you bother with that useless blog?”

 

John shrugs.

 

“Because words can make a moment seem more real.”

 

Xx

 

John goes to work and comes home.

 

Sherlock experiments, doesn’t eat or sleep.

 

It works.

 

Xx

 

John almost calls his sister.

 

In the end, they’ve been dead to each other for years now.

 

So he doesn’t.

 

Xx

 

He’s stopped thinking about reenlisting.

 

Xx

 

Sherlock makes him break on a Tuesday.

 

The black mood’s drawn tight and suffocating over 221b Baker Street, and John’s forgotten how to breathe. There hasn’t been a case in three weeks, he ran out of experiments on the second, and the seconds crawl by agonizingly.

 

He looked at John, eyes narrowed and face pinched and told him _exactly_ how much he was needed, ex-soldier who could barely keep a part-time surgery job, found in a bedsit at a dead end, empty-headed ignorance, distraction, useless.

 

John left.

 

His left hand trembles.

 

Xx

 

M calls

 

and

 

calls

 

and

 

calls.

 

Xx

 

He doesn’t come home until midnight has come and gone and the streetlights start to blur together.

 

“I suppose you’ll want to pack, Doctor?” Sherlock asks harshly from the couch, where he’s curled up like some pale dragon claiming its territory.

 

John rolls his eyes and trudges to the kitchen for tea, he thinks all the way about the pitiful welled-up sadness in the taller man’s eyes. Like a child still pretending to be mad long after they’ve realized they’ve hurt someone.

 

He doesn’t see Sherlock smile.

 

But then, Sherlock doesn’t see him smile either.

 

Xx

 

Bond calls him on a Wednesday.

 

John picks up this time.

 

Xx

 

The bar they’ve picked is seedy and old, packed with elderly men and good scotch.

 

It’s perfect.

 

John downs his first with practiced ease, and his eyes trace the new lines and scars on Bond.

 

 “Not so young and pretty anymore?” James asked bluntly, and John remembers telling him he was in basic training, meaning it as an insult. His five o’clock shadow is dusty blonde and John wonders when the first whispers of silver will thread themselves into it. His hair is short and his eyes are a clear, light blue, and his shoulders are still wide and strong. There is a well-worn look to him, handsome and classic.

 

“Time’s not been so good to us,” he agrees jokingly.

 

Bond grins, and it’s boyish, it’s young.

 

“I disagree; you’re still just as dashing as I remember.”

 

“Trying to compliment me into your bed?” John asks around a laugh, swallowing another scotch.

 

“Again, you mean?”

 

“If you remember, it was _my_ bed.”

 

“I do remember.”

 

They laugh, toast, drink.

 

They’re in one of those bars that enable smoking habits in the late hours, despite the laws, and the smoke settles sweetly on their lungs. They breathe.

 

They’re still young, somewhere in there. Little soldier boys marching off to war, guns in their waistbands and exploding dental floss in their pockets. Not so much has changed, and it’s nice to think so.

 

And it’s nice that they can dance around it, a night in the Southern Ukraine when they were both beaten and bloody and raw and clung to each other to prove they were alive. A sweat drenched night in John’s bed, learning each other by touch and promising this was the only time, _don’t get any ideas, Bond_.

 

It’s nice that it can hang there, between them, without infecting. Without corroding their words.

 

No.

 

That was something else entirely.

 

“You know I wanted to get you out, right?” James had always been one to come out and say things. To spit them back in your face with no remorse, just his cold blue eyes and the scars that littered his forearms.

 

John sighs, sinks back against the chair.

 

The sky feels heavy, the world curls itself close and foggy against his senses.

 

“Yeah James, I know.”

 

“I can still see it sometimes, out the corner of my eye,” he murmurs. It’s not a whisper, it has weight. That makes a difference. John doesn’t know what it is yet. “Like a broken marionette. Seen you shirtless a lot, mate, never so thin. Thought you were dead.”

 

“Me too.”

 

They drink.

 

“I don’t hate you,” John says, and he means it.

 

A silence crawls up the back of their spines and swims inside their scotch.

 

The bottle’s almost half gone.

 

The half-light casts strange shadows on Bond’s face, and John thinks he looks like he was left out in the rain to rust and weather.

 

He fingers the lip of his glass, and stares at John like he’s hidden all the secrets of the world inside his eyes.

 

“You didn’t pick up.”

 

“I know.”

 

They drink.

 

What they don’t say is understood:

_I thought you were dead._

_Me too._

_You should have picked up._

_I should have._

_Sometimes I think about that night together, sweaty and confused and angry, hatred rolling off our limbs like great bursts of flames. The time in between the first punch and the first kiss where hatred swelled and burned inside our chests._

_I try not to._

_Me too._

 

What they do say will never be enough:

 

“So is retirement at least survivable?”

 

“No, mate. Not for me.”

 

Bond smiles, and his face blurs for a moment.

 

John stares at his glass, blinking past the weight of liquor.

 

“Not much to look forward to, then,” James says with a faux lightness that sinks down into John’s skin.

 

“Thought you wanted to die in the field, out with a bang and all that?”

 

James laughs, and it’s bitter. It cuts knives into the air between them.

 

“Doubt I’ll get the chance at this rate. M’s on her way out and every suit on the way in agrees that agents are obsolete. We’re a dying breed, John,” he spits harshly, his eyes cold flints of ice.

 

His knuckles whiten around his glass, and for a moment John is sure it will shatter.

 

It doesn’t.

 

“Bond—they need us. They’ve always needed us,” John stammers.

 

“Look around, Watson, hackers can take down nations, drones are blocking out the fucking sun, they can do what we can in less time for less money. No one cares about the intricacies of espionage anymore! No one cares about the human capability to move undetected and eliminate a target without alerting half the globe. There’s nothing left for us to do, nothing more for us to find. _There are no more secrets_!”

 

The bar waits in hushed silence for the sound of their hearts to reach them.

 

The smoke drifts.

 

John’s hands shake.

 

James breathes hard, his chest heaving as he rubs roughly at his eyes, as if he can wipe away the mark the agency has left on him. Dissolve all the bonds.

 

He’ll be nothing when it’s over, just like John.

 

So John does something he hasn’t before.

 

Even though a single night colored in bruises and scratchy sheets is long behind them, and all he really knows of James is the bitter, uncomfortable taste he put in his mouth, and they’ve never been friends, John lets his fingers lead him to James’ hand.

 

He grips.

 

James holds on as if he is the only thing keeping him alive.

 

If his shoulders shake, John doesn’t say anything.

 

If his strangled laughter sounds almost like a sob, John doesn’t say anything.

 

He also doesn’t let go.

 

Bond looks so small, shoulders caved in on himself and the stern, unforgiving look of his face crumpled into fear. When all his roads change to water ways, he’ll drown.

 

He knows it, like John had known it.

 

And it would be easy, John thinks, to slip across the space between them and part the cigarette smoke like a curtain and kiss him, to find some ease and knowledge in another warm body. It would be easy to brush his fingers through short blonde hair and find some kind of kinship in blue eyes, to lick an infinity symbol at the base of his throat—because they’ve been here before. Because they will be here again, every time there’s nothing left, it’s the two of them. It’s them on all the missions gone wrong, when bomb blasts and gunshots mark their skin. It’s the Ukraine, a single night filled with hatred and passion in a motel room after twenty six people die and there’s no one to blame but themselves. It’s in Casablanca, after John’s heart is carved from his chest and he needs someone to finish a mission he can’t face anymore. It’s in Tokyo, when Bond’s in over his head and he can’t call anyone, so he calls John. It’s in Afghanistan, when John’s three weeks starved and tortured and there’s nothing but the inside of a cave and the wild-crazed look in James’ eyes when he was found.

 

They’re not friends.

 

They’re not even lovers.

 

But they are there.

 

They are always there.

 

So John doesn’t kiss him, and he doesn’t let go, and the alcohol’s starting to wear loose and runny on his bones.

 

“C’mon Bond, just think, the world will always need mercenaries. That’s job security right there,” he says with a soft smile, something secret and warm.

 

“I can see it now, 007 ex-agent in her Majesty’s service gone rogue,” he chuckles bleakly.

 

“Like we aren’t already, sure, pinned down nice and easy and nearly tamed by our suits and our style. But you and I know what it means to be rogue, we know it the minute we stare down our sights and know we _want_ to pull the trigger. We want a trigger to be pulled on us.” John swallows, slips out his second license from the embrace of his wallet and set it between their glasses. “License to kill, James. We’re hungry for the very edge; they just shaped us into murderers with questionable consciences. What’s so different about being a mercenary? A consulting detective? A serial killer?”

 

They stare at each other, and they miss the certain uncertainty of their jobs.

 

They miss the rush.

 

“Queen and country,” Bond answers after a moment, slapping his own license down to pair John’s. “And exploding dental floss.”

 

They laugh.

 

It’s good.

 

If John’s being honest, he wishes Sherlock were here, so he didn’t have to lie anymore. So the detective could see all the raw, broken pieces he’s letting out now, so he could learn all the things he got wrong that first day. So he could see John Watson for what he was.

 

He wishes Sherlock could hear the catch in his voice when he talked about killing, when he talked about the rush, the high. So he could see that John knows what it means to be addicted.

 

He wishes Sherlock could pick him apart again, tell him about all the places he’s been and all the people he’s killed. So that he could know the truth, even the hard parts.

 

“Queen and country,” John murmurs, a sly, soft smile coloring his features. “I’ll drink to that.”

 

They do.

 

“We’re still young somewhere in there, aren’t we John?” Bond asks quietly, grimly.

 

John knows what he’s really asking.

 

“I think so,” he starts. “Somewhere in there, we’re still two agents about to break their thirties, a mission gone wrong behind them and feeling that can’t decide on anger or desire eating away at us. We’re still young, but I don’t think we could get that back. Not even for a night.”

 

A tone sounds.

 

John’s phone.

_When you’re done rekindling your old flame, do remember to pick up milk._

_SH_

 

He smiles.

 

Bond makes a noise that says he thought so, and stretches lithe and cat-like in his chair.

 

“Best be off then, still got a few good missions left in me and M knows it. She’ll have me worked into the ground come next year,” he says lazily, his voice scratching comfortably over John’s senses. “She’s worried about you, you know. Said you sounded half-crazed when you called her rambling about your mission objective.”

 

He says it casually.

 

John is reminded of why he was never friends with Bond.

 

He says nothing.

 

They shake hands, and Bond looks at him, really looks at him. Sees all the weathered crevices and secret places and strong, life-filled corners that have grown full with sunlight again, and when he speaks his voice is a whisper.

 

“You ever need me, don’t be afraid to call.”

 

It’s a challenge as much as it is a promise.

 

“I won’t. Same for you.”

 

James Bond nods, his lips stretching up into a comfortable, friendly smile of goodbye.

 

“Pick up this time.”

 

Xx

 

There’s a darkness in his bones he doesn’t talk about.

 

A lust.

 

The feeling of desire when a gun feels heavy in his hand and the only person who’s ever understood that was John, even if they can barely qualify as friends.

 

John probably knows him better than anyone else.

 

James saunters down a back alley, his suit hugging his scarred body, trying not to think about the warm, alive look in his eyes.

 

He’d found something besides the agency, and it was almost like cheating.

 

Almost like being lied to.

 

But he looked happy.

 

If he didn’t still see a near corpse in his dreams, James might have the heart to hate him for his happiness. For his peace in his own slice of chaos when James is feeling the rug ripping out from under him. He’s knee-deep in time, and it’s dragging him down.

 

Almost forty.

 

He rubs his hands over his eyes, wishes he had something more than mercenary work to fall back on.

 

He doesn’t.

 

Footsteps sound behind him, and he stills, senses reaching careful fingers out in to the darkness.

 

“You’re a man,” a deep voice states, surprised. The sound of it is almost intimate, such a low, rumbling baritone. He thinks it should be reserved for bedrooms.

 

James turns with a quirked brow to find a tall, lean man with sharp cheekbones and smoke eyes and wild hair staring him down. He has three guesses.

 

“Last time I checked, yeah,” James says lightly.

 

The man frowns, as if James’ existence has personally offended him.

 

“But John is straight.”

 

One guess.

 

“Sherlock, then?”

 

“Yes, obviously.”

 

James stuffs his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “Normally people introduce themselves, instead of following them down back alleys.”

 

Sherlock snorts. “Normal is boring.”

 

“Too right, you are. Name’s Bond. James Bond.” It rolls of his tongue like it does to marks, like it does on missions. And it feels like one.

 

Sherlock has an energy in his eyes, in the way he looks at you like he’s ripping you apart. He can see why John sticks close to him.

 

“Wait, did you say John was straight? John Watson?” he asks, incredulous laughter peeling from his chest. “Straight! Your flatmate bloody _ruined_ me for other men, and that was years ago.” He wipes at his eyes and tries not to think about how true it was.

 

Sherlock takes a half step back.

 

“Oh, John, you’ve managed to surprise me,” he whispers, a manic grin spreading like a lightning flash across his face. It’s like a hurricane or a firestorm.

 

It’s enrapturing.

 

And then he’s gone, his coat swirling behind him a mad laugh bouncing from the brick work of the alley and getting lost in the London night air.

 

He stops at the mouth of the alley abruptly, as if he’s only just realized something, and turns to look back at James, cast in shadow and stern looking. “Did you love him?” Sherlock calls, his voice rushed and pent up. As if this is the key to everything else.

 

James thinks for a moment.

 

He recalls heat and bruises and the way it felt when John finally got the upper hand in the fight and pinned him down until it felt like his shoulders would break beneath his hands. He recalls kisses and bites and the taste of sweat and anger on their tongues.

 

By John’s second year at SIS, half the agency was in love with him in some way. His smile or his kill streak.

 

His doctor’s hands or agent heart.

 

His eyes or his kiss.

 

His fighting or his fucking.

 

James smiles.

 

“For a night,” he says quietly, staring up into the sky. "Just for a night."

 

Xx

 

John is making tea when Sherlock gets back, his forehead is creased with troubling thoughts that Sherlock can see written in his shoulders and in his eyes. But the motions are familiar, and the detective sinks onto the couch easily.

 

“How was your night out?” he asks, as though he had no just walked in the door, as if he didn’t have an idea, tucked away comfortably in a café across the street to watch John’s facial expressions without being seen.

 

Any closer and the doctor would have noticed him.

 

“I’m sure you have some idea,” John answered absently, passing him a cuppa and sinking down into his chair.

 

“Don’t think too hard, it might hurt,” Sherlock says.

 

It gets John to look up.

 

“It’s nothing. Just something he said.”

 

Sherlock doesn’t pick at the way he admits to gender, doesn’t press on that front, remembers the look of quiet, content reminiscence swimming in Bond’s eyes when he thought about love. Doesn’t need to hear it.

 

“And what’s that?”

 

John looks up at him slowly and he’s struck by how blue his eyes look. How careworn he is.

 

“Things are changing for men like Bond and I,” he whispers to himself. “And in our world that’s never good.”

 

Xx

 

A week later, M has called twenty three times.

 

John still doesn’t pick up.

 

Xx

 

“What’s changing?” Sherlock asks, staring at the wallpaper as if he is far away.

 

John blinks, and wonders for a moment if Sherlock is even talking to him.

 

“ _John_ , what’s changing?”

 

His fingers hover the keyboard, ready for another rhythmic flow of words and this is his piano, the music is his words, breathing more and more refined in type face as he goes. He chews over his next words carefully.

 

“The world’s…not going to need men like me soon,” he says finally. But even those words taste wrong in his mouth. Not right.

 

And then Sherlock is _there_ , suddenly an inch away from John’s face, all impossible cheek bones and hair getting long enough to fall in his smoke-screen eyes. John can feel the heat from his skin.

 

“Don’t be ridiculous John.” he snaps, teeth bared. “ _What’s_ changing?”

 

He looks feral.

 

Rogue.

 

John’s mouth quirks into a smile without his permission, curving carefully at the corners and he thinks, maybe, some part of him would understand. His voice is a whisper, caught on the silence and filled with something like awe.

 

“Everything.”

 

Xx

 

John never says thank you, for any of it.

 

It would go to his head.

 

Xx

It’s two weeks after Bond that Sherlock finally brings it up.

 

John’s lost the internal bet he had with himself by thirteen days and twenty three hours.

 

“John, have you ever had a gay relationship?” Sherlock asks, pouring over his laptop. “I’m trying to gather data on the average male’s sexual tendencies.”

 

John sips his tea slowly.

 

“Bond and I were never in a relationship,” he says flatly, standing and heading for his room. The flat swells and burns with the things they don’t say. He halts at the stairs, and meets eyes like fog across the room. “But the one in Casablanca was a man.”

 

Xx

 

When they run it’s kind of like launching ships, kind of like lightning strikes, and kind of like war. When they take to the city by the barest glimmer of streetlights and stars, it’s like slipping beneath the surface. When they thread their fingers into the alleyways and the grime and the dirt, it’s like crazed laughter and being so high up you can _never_ come down. When they dodge knives and bullets made to split them at the seams, it’s like drowning in adrenaline. It’s like the first breath after breaking the surface.

 

The chase is everything, and both of them know it.

 

At the mouth of an alley, John pauses to catch his breath as it leaves him in white puffs in the darkness. Sherlock grins at him, and that’s like the moon on fire, wildfires in the sky, dancing fireflies, and a thousand other impossible things.

 

“Shall we?” he asks, a month between them that feels like seconds and lifetimes pools and warms and slides along their skin.

 

“After you,” John offers.

 

And they’re off again, and that's kind of like coming home.


	5. Quantum of Solace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have you missed me?  
> I'm so sorry I've not updated, but I've been extremely busy.  
> Some news you probably don't care about: chemistry paper, ap us history tests, got a boyfriend (waht, no longer forever alone, how strange is that?), won a poetry slam thingy, and got my prom dress.  
> News you care about a bit more: I've a rough outline of what I want this whole thing to turn out like, and it looks like it'll be a decent amount of chapters. Possibly a sequel as well, so that means relatively consistent updates which I will try my hardest to provide.  
> Thank you all so much for the support, the comments last time were literally some the greatest things any one's ever said about my writing and it made me extremely happy. Please keep it up.  
> The poem referenced is T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" which everyone should read.   
> Don't forget to comment!  
> -Han

There’s an edge one midnight.

 

A sharp gaping wound between two buildings, and the darkness seems to slip into him without his permission.

 

Streetlamps cast a hazy glow that barely reaches them, three stories above the grime of an alley, but he finds that it’s never quite night in London. Just enough for the darkness to feel like a whisper of wind, crawling up the back of his neck and falling into his eyes.

 

There’s an edge on midnight.

 

And Sherlock takes it at a run, coat twisting behind him in a wind he creates, and then there’s nothing but air, and John can’t breathe.

 

He lands.

 

He’s safe.

 

Sherlock turns back, wild-eyed and impatient, staring at John with that arrogant twist to his lips.

 

“Jump,” he demands.

 

So he does.

 

“Your trust in me is foolish,” Sherlock says into the darkness. But he’s smiling.

 

John shrugs as he dusts himself off, feeling the old strain in the back of his calves and the coolness of the air brushing against his skin. He feels like he’s back, 003 with the night as his best weapon.

 

It’s good.

 

It’s like breathing, like coming out the other end of a tunnel, like flying.

 

“You would’ve done the same for me,” he says, grinning.

 

And he feels alive.

 

Sherlock looks up at the stars, and his face looks crumpled in on itself; his eyes are far away.

 

“Would I?”

 

Xx

 

John sighs, and holds out a plate to Sherlock.

 

“If you don’t eat breakfast, neither will I.”

 

“Don’t be ridiculous, you need to eat.”

 

John nods.

 

The morning light dapples them in strange patterns.

 

Sherlock takes the plate.

 

Xx

 

Sometimes the night crawls into their laps and settles there.

 

So they sit cradled in the blue-glow of the television and watch old spy movies until the sun comes up.

 

John will look up from watches deflecting bullets and see Sherlock seeing him.

 

Watching him instead of the film.

 

And that’s okay.

 

Xx

 

A case goes unsolved when midnights fade to mornings and sleeplessness is rote.

 

When the moon hangs fat and swollen behind a screen of rain that pounds against their windows. When their eyes are sun-setting. When Sherlock looks lost.

 

These are the chaseless moments, when John is only as useful as Sherlock allows him to be. When the computer screen starts to blur. He does nothing but scan articles, hack into case files, and watch Sherlock think.

 

Today his eyes are a soft, translucent green.

 

“I’m going to write it up,” John says, uncountable hours later. His blog blinks hazily with a growing following that’s yet to see Sherlock fail.

 

“ _I’m going to solve it_ ,” he shouts, jerking up from the couch in a movement made fluid by his blue robe twisting elegantly behind him. A door slams. John is alone. The sun will rise and fall again before he is finished, though the rain will make that almost impossible to tell.

 

He takes his time writing, and thinks about the call.

 

A single, choked sob down the direct line to DI Lestrade in the early morning, received by voicemail, sent to Sherlock by email on the morning of the twenty first with a request to locate the woman on the other end.

 

It was the twenty fifth.

 

They had found nothing.

 

He thinks about the way her cry, echoing strangely down the line, had held such finality. As if the world had ended the way Eliot had said it would, _not with a bang but a whimper._

 

He feels like one of those Hollow Men, sometimes.

 

So John writes it, his fingers moving rhythmic to some music only his fingertips could hear, his tea gone cold beside him. The lamplight makes his skin sing a warm tan. His hands linger with the sadness of her sound, and seem to swim before his eyes without his permission. He wonders if Sherlock has left, before he forgets how to wonder. Before he loses himself in type-face, and discovers something strange and new and secret.

 

The pieces of him that rage against his body, scream for his license and his number, those pieces are quiet now.

 

They are hushed before the cry that ends the world.

 

He titles the post “But a Whimper.”

 

Eleven minutes later, Sherlock bursts into the room, manic grin plastered to his pale face. His fingers tap away at his phone as his eyes meet John’s

 

“ _This is the way the world ends,_ ” he whispers vehemently. “ _John_ , sometimes your genius is profound!”

 

He finds her in a ventilation shaft of The World’s End pub in Camden, Lestrade’s preferred haunt. Her husband entombed her there after she threatened to tell the DI about a planned insurance scheme. Her voice caught in the metal embrace of the air system echoed thin and quiet, before he beat her into unconsciousness. By the time she woke, the pub was ‘closed for remodeling’, and there was no one to hear her.

 

She’s unconscious again by the time they find her, pressed against a vent for air, four days without food or water.

 

She makes the same, soft whimper when they pull her from its hold.

 

As she’s loaded into the ambulance, Sherlock watches the blue and red lights paint his doctor’s face; he wonders what kind of man he is.

 

One who loses sleep and days and pushes until he nearly breaks and wears down the ones who get close enough to see him.

 

More distant and solemn than a fading star.

 

Xx

 

They go to Angelo’s to celebrate.

 

A candle is lit between them.

 

John says nothing.

 

Sherlock pays.

 

When John laughs, head tipped back and chest heaving, at a joke about a cadaver, Sherlock thinks it’s kind of like breathing.

 

Xx

 

The bank is huge and white, and Sebastian Wilkes stares at Sherlock like a shark might at bloodied water.

 

Xx

 

“This is my friend, John Watson.”

 

“ _Friend_ ,” Sebastian mouths incredulously.

 

“Partner,” John says quickly, staring him down coldly.

 

Xx

 

Sebastian pushes on the blank periods in Sherlock’s life, where John knew he found drugs and knew nothing else.

 

And Sherlock lets him.

 

His eyes, a soft blue this morning, are on the ground or impossibly lost.

 

John hates it.

 

Xx

 

“We’ll pay you. Five figures.”

 

“I don’t need an incentive, Sebastian,” Sherlock says softly.

 

John meets Sebastian’s eyes from across the room, and a cruel twist of his lips makes the room feel like crumpled snow.

 

“I’ll be a moment,” he calls to Sherlock as the taller man breezes out.

 

Xx

 

The door shuts softly behind John as he rejoins Sherlock in the hallway, there is a pleasant smile on the doctor’s face.

 

“What did you say to him?” Sherlock asks softly, gesturing to the office.

 

John hates all that he reads in those smoke-screen eyes.

 

“He balanced my checkbook,” John says brightly.

 

Xx

 

Sherlock’s face is a careful neutral, and John wonders what he would find beneath the mask.

 

His leg twinges as they walk towards the elevator.

 

Xx

 

“I’ve been thinking,” Sherlock says.

 

He doesn’t say anything.

 

“I’ve been thinking,” he repeats. “About why your psychosomatic injury would have manifested itself in your leg.”

 

John’s tongue works his lower lip for a moment, and the warm glow of the room lingers like a kind of smoke.

 

“You should be focusing on the case,” he states flatly.

 

“Why?” Sherlock asks, ignoring him.

 

An experiment from the kitchen smells like formaldehyde.

 

“Trust me; don’t ask,” John says quietly, and his voice carries strangely. It lingers in the room for beats longer than it should have. 221b stretches out the hesitant sound of it, twists it up in the purple wallpaper and runs it through the case files, until it tastes nearly pleading.

 

Sherlock’s eyes narrow, his lips part as if to speak.

 

“Jump,” John says, cutting him off, because it’s all he can think to say.

 

Sherlock considers, and then his mouth closes.

 

Xx

 

John wants to get lost in this museum.

 

He wants to find every secret hidden corner and tell the walls stories about the three pieces he had to hunt down in ’96 and the thief with one eye and a wicked smile.

 

He wants to slip into a tux and round the corners sharp and suave, until the paintings believe he’s still the man he was back then.

 

Sherlock doesn’t see this pass over his face.

 

But that’s just as well.

 

Xx

 

Sarah asks him out on a date.

 

He says yes.

 

He doesn’t quite know why.

 

Xx

 

The darkness cradles them close and calm, but he can still hear Soo Lin’s breathing, harsh and uneven as she bends over the pictures of yellow graffiti. She tries to smile up at him, and he thinks about the crude, unclean needle that carved a lotus into her heel.

 

He thinks about being marked.

 

Being owned.

 

Xx

 

He loses Soo Lin.

 

She dies quietly.

 

Xx

 

“We’re going out tonight,” Sherlock says without preamble.

 

John looks up from his stack of open books, and his smile looks almost confused when he turns it on Sherlock.

 

“Actually, I’ve got a date tonight.”

 

“What?” Sherlock asks. The light makes him seem even paler to John’s eyes.

 

“It’s where two people who like each other go out and have fun,” he tries to joke.

 

The room feels smaller.

 

“That’s what I was suggesting,” Sherlock says flatly.

 

There’s a childish confusion in his translucent eyes, a wounded look that hovers where John can’t quite understand it.

 

John looks down, and his fingers play on the edge of a page. He tries not to think.

 

His voice is soft when he speaks.

 

“No it wasn’t.”

 

Xx

 

He isn’t surprised when Sherlock appears behind him, bone-deep baritone swimming in the spaces between them.

 

Xx

 

His skin glows beneath the circus lights.

 

Xx

 

When Sherlock disappears behind a heavy red curtain, it’s all John can do not to follow him.

 

It’s all he can do to remember that Sarah has his arm.

 

That the dim lighting should make his heart beat faster.

 

That he should take her hand.

 

That this night is meant for two.

 

And not for Sherlock.

 

When the fight comes, it’s all John can do not to lose himself in it.

 

Xx

 

Sarah stays, because something in her is braver than John had thought, and because they have Chinese on the way.

 

They laugh over that.

 

When she finds what they had overlooked, the beginning of a translation by the woman John couldn’t save, Soo Lin’s final act, there is nothing but Sherlock. Illuminated, Sherlock’s eyes grow far and away, and John can almost see the avenues he travels down.

 

He seems to command the light, bends the lamps to burn when his eyes do.

 

“That book is in her office!”

 

And then he’s gone.

 

His absence gapes like a new wound. John wants to follow; he can feel his heartbeat stutter into racing, the tips of his fingers itch for his gun. But Sarah.

 

He stays.

 

Xx

 

The doorbell rings.

 

It isn’t Chinese takeout.

 

As the world grows dark, John thinks about M. He thinks about kidnap and his number. He thinks about the years this seemed easy. And he thinks about Sherlock, and tries to find the expression the detective might be wearing when he comes to find an empty flat.

 

He passes out before it’s fully formed.

 

Xx

 

The ropes bite into his arms and he is

 

not

 

here.

 

He is so far from

 

the circus

 

and this tunnel feels like a cave.

 

Xx

 

When Sherlock frees him, feverish fingers trembling around the rope, John launches into the fray. He fights, pushes against the walls of his own mind and flesh bruises beneath his hands.

 

He is blood-spattered with chest heaving when pale fingers find his shoulders.

 

“John,” he says.

 

And he falls back into John Watson MD.

 

Sarah doesn’t look at him the same afterwards, like he is not himself.

 

Sherlock looks at him like the fog is lifting.

 

Xx

 

The flat is warm upon their welcoming, backs bowed with the weariness. They collapse in their respective chairs, legs akimbo before them, and count the stains on the ceiling until their heartbeats start to slow down again.

 

“That,” Sherlock says in that heavy, reluctant way of his. “That, what happened there. It shouldn’t have.”

 

And because he knows what Sherlock is trying to say, he lets his eyes find the detective.

 

“Kidnappings happen.”

 

“Before,” Sherlock notes, pale eyes tracing all the contours of John’s body, like his past is written there.

 

Maybe it is.

 

Maybe there is a cave in the fold of his sweater and water in the calluses on his fingers.

 

“Before,” John agrees.

 

Sherlock lets the silence stretch, and it yawns between them like a physical presence they can’t breech. They are adrift at sea, but the waves are soft tonight. And then the detective stands, rumpled suit hanging delicately off his frame, and he moves into the kitchen.

 

He comes back with two cups of tea.

 

Xx

 

John Watson falls asleep and dares to dream, that night.

 

He dares to close his eyes and let himself

 

drift.

 

And the things he finds do not leave him choking on air, desperate for lamplight to illuminate the darkest corners of his mind, swallowing a scream.

 

The things he finds are beautiful.

 

Xx

 

Sherlock looks at him as if he belongs beneath a microscope slide.

 

When his lips part, there is a considering furrow between his brows.

 

John says “Jump.”

 

And the room lingers in quiet.

 

He has begun whisper it in his sleep.

 

Xx

 

“Partner?” Sherlock asks one morning, his eyes on the paper.

 

John looks up, and for a moment Sherlock is much younger. A University student with the world against him, with a brain too big for campus. Lips that hesitantly twist at the corners when Sebastian Wilkes tells him he’s his friend.

 

“Some words have weight,” he says. A cold look comes to Sherlock’s eyes, and he realizes there is no room for error. “Partner has more.”

 

That slow, pleased smile spreads across the detective’s face.

 

He’s never seen it given to anyone else.

 

John returns it.


	6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. Um.  
> Have you missed me?  
> I'm so incredibly sorry to have left this alone for so long, but I've been really really busy. I plan on keeping this up as a once a week thing during the summer, hopefully.  
> Please Please Please comment, I absolutely adore reading what you all have to say,  
> Thanks so much for reading.  
> -Han

“I fail to see the appeal of this.”

 

John leans back on his arms, his beer lukewarm and sweating in his hand. The night’s cold, and it wraps around them with a layer of cloud and car exhaust that makes the world seem to be made of nothing but rooftops and smoke. It’s what he thinks Old London might have been like, when T.S. Eliot was shambling down the streets whispering about the love of a man named Prufrock.

 

“Bored, John.”

 

John closes his eyes and swallows the bleak sky.

 

“Shut up and drink your wine, Sherlock.”

 

The detective does so, lingering on the taste of rich pinot noir. The only gift from Mycroft he’s ever appreciated.

 

“Me and the boys used to do this in Kabul.” The silence swells and pools. “Could get in so much trouble. That was before we got shipped to the Hindu Kush, before we really took fire and we lost our first man. Back when we were still kids. We’d climb up onto the roof and watch the stars.”

 

John doesn’t remember the difference between who he is and who he’s supposed to be.

 

The alcohol is swimming warm through his veins and how old was he when he entered Kabul for the first time? When was the last time he drank above a bombed out city? And when did he jump, pack heavy and night hot, onto a helicopter a foot in the air and say goodbye to it all?

 

“There are no stars.”

 

“Shut up.”

 

John wraps his arms over his knees.

 

“We’d try to find all the constellations, and it was like the whole hemisphere was open to us.” He pauses, and turns towards Sherlock. “A hemisphere is--”

 

“I know what a damned hemisphere is!”

 

John laughs, and it’s throaty and alive and it echoes off the top of 221b and finds its home in the sky. He could feel Sherlock smiling beside him, though the other man would never admit it. Sherlock’s heat slips into him, pressed shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee in the cold. John watches his breath snake from his lips like smoke.

 

“If you looked straight up,” John whispers. “You could be anywhere. You could be in Cardiff or Australia, America, anywhere but there.”

 

Sherlock does as John suggests and tips his head all the way back, his pale skin catching the dull glow of streetlamps and apartment lights. They are consumed in the haze of humanity, and the night seems more alive here.

 

His eyes trace clouds and try to find pieces of the sky.

 

“There is only one London,” he says finally, and his voice holds something new in it. Something thoughtful and slow.

 

John finishes off his bottle, and lets it roll away from him, back towards the center of the roof. Their perch on the edge seems so precarious, and for a moment he feels like a gargoyle or an angel. Perched and watching life below.

 

Sherlock is a steady presence beside him, and maybe that’s all that keeps him from seeing if he can fly.

 

“S’right,” John nods. “Just the one.”

 

Xx

 

John falls in love sometimes.

 

With the memory.

 

He pulls out his license and stares at it in the cold, pooling light of a streetlamp three blocks from home and he thinks about dying. Falling and never getting up.

 

He pockets the license. He walks home.

 

He sits beside Sherlock in the blue-glow of the television, and he sinks down into something quickly becoming familiar. Warmth seeps into his bones.

 

Xx

 

Bond leaves him a note on his refrigerator, just to prove he can.

 

_There is one more secret._

 

_-007_

 

He doesn’t sleep that night.

 

Xx

 

“You’ve killed, yes?”

 

John looks at him steadily over the morning paper.

 

“Yes, obviously, yes I know, but.” Sherlock leans forward. “How does it feel?”

 

John swallows; his fingers trace the corner of the page. Ink smears lightly on his thumb. Morning light plays across their skin.

 

“Depends on the situation.”

 

“In war?”

 

Sherlock waits for him to speak again.

 

His tea has gone cold.

 

“Like taking a long breath after being underwater,” he says softly. He meets Sherlock’s eyes. “But then you realize it isn’t air at all. It’s just empty space, a vacuum. And you have to go below again.”

 

Xx

 

Shadows linger on the inside of his eyes.

 

Sometimes it strikes him that he’s alive, and he takes huge long breaths that taste like Sunday morning papers and cold coffee. Sherlock looks at him across the room, like there are pieces of him scattered around the whole world.

 

And he’s going to find all of them.

 

John believes him.

 

Xx

 

John leans against the counter, slim hips avoiding a rack of acidic smelling test tubes, and sips his morning tea. The table has been colonized by samples of raw meat left to soak in different liquids.

 

It has begun to be hard to breathe.

 

John sighs, and swallows toxic air and is at home.

 

“Oh, I _love_ a good torture victim in the morning!” Sherlock shouts by entrance. He’s fully dressed for the first time all week, and his eyes are manic and untamed.

 

John sips his tea.

 

“Come along, John. Get dressed, we don’t have all day.”

 

The light makes Sherlock look almost translucent, and for a moment John believes him to be a design of his own mind. A mad, ghost of a man. Nothing more.

 

John meets Sherlock’s eyes, and there is nothing but the silence they have created for themselves to live inside and whatever it is Sherlock sees in him.

 

“I have a shift.”

 

“Call in sick.”

 

There’s a hard insistence in his voice. Like a child who can sense play time is almost over and isn’t ready.

 

“I have a shift.”

 

Sherlock sighs, impatient and haughty. “It’s a _torture_ victim, John! I need a real doctor there to gauge the severity of his wounds. Can you imagine the level of experience it must have taken to keep them alive as long as Molly claims? Oh the experiments I could perform! Do you honest think _Anderson_ could handle something so--”

 

John turns to face the window.

 

His leg throbs.

 

“I have a shift,” he whispers. His voice carries into all the empty spaces.

 

Sherlock straightens, pale fingers adjusting his flawless suit with deft movements. His eyes are very far away, lingering over the window sill and out towards the clouded sky.

 

“Of course. I’ll see you upon your return,” he says formally.

 

He doesn’t look at John.

 

He leaves.

 

John sets down his tea and lets his shoulders hunch inward. The room feels too small, the walls press in on him. He is in pieces. He is not well.

 

He retches into the sink.

 

Xx

 

John lives beneath a microscope.

 

Every CCTV seems to be blinking in his direction. Every black sedan has his name on it. Every suit-wearing passerby is an agent. Every hum from his phone is a request to join up.

 

Every glance from Sherlock is suspicious.

 

John lives beneath a microscope.

 

Xx

 

“Mycroft’s attempting to prove his reach again.”

 

Sherlock plucks softly on his violin. He holds it like John imagines one would hold a star, or a piece of the sky. He nods to a note on the fridge, right next to John’s polite reminder to label his collection of thumbs _please_.

 

_It’s nearly come time to renew your license, Doctor Watson._

 

_-MH_

 

John wishes people would stop leaving him cryptic notes in his kitchen.

 

“But as I recall, you don’t require a renewal for another two years. So, to what, Doctor Watson, could my dear brother be referring?” There is a cold look in his eyes, and he looks at John like he has never seen him before.

 

John swallows.

 

“He thinks he can pressure me into a job.”

 

Sherlock stares at him.

 

“I have no plans on taking it.”

 

Xx

 

Some nights, he dreams of driving until his beautiful car breaks down. Until his twenty-seventh birthday present to himself crumbles along the road and he has to get out and walk. And he stumbles up the road until his boots disintegrate and he bleeds into the concrete, the Aston Martin abandoned somewhere behind him.

 

Xx

 

When he was twenty-nine, he took an assignment to Bangkok.

 

He became the city.

 

He smoked and drank and visited strip clubs with flashing colored lights.

 

And he killed twenty two people in a week.

 

He slept better on the plane home than he had in his entire life.

 

Xx

 

A black sedan follows him from the surgery to the flat.

 

You never really leave MI6, he thinks.

 

Xx

 

He comes home to a sterile kitchen, a diagram of the human body, fifteen knives, and a cigarette lighter. Sherlock is bare-chested at the table with clinical eyes resting on his bleeding forearm.

 

He stops in the doorway.

 

“I will leave.”

 

Sherlock looks up. The blood is beginning to coagulate, and turn a rusty brown against his pale skin.

 

“Feel free.”

 

John swallows.

 

“And I won’t come back.”

 

Sherlock nods slowly. The knife in his hands catches the light and seems to glow like an ancient, holy blade.

 

He drives it into the table in a sudden move, one that makes John flinch back.

 

They stare at each other, and John finds all the human things hiding beneath Sherlock’s skin. He wonders what Sherlock can see in him.

 

“Tell me what I need to know. For the case.”

 

His voice is so soft; John has to strain to hear it. But there it is, an accusation, a deduction, buried beneath the surface. His mouth takes a grim twist, and Sherlock thinks he looks almost inhuman in this instant.

 

“I’m going.”

 

John heads for the door, the barest hint of a limp catching on his movements. He pauses, his hand on the knob. His eyes find something over Sherlock’s head, and he speaks to that space.

 

“I’ll be home later.”

 

Xx

 

John used to smoke, before the compound.

 

It was a relaxing habit that found him only after the high of a mission completed. He’s quit twenty seven times in his life.

 

He lights one.

 

Twenty eight tomorrow.

 

Xx

 

The black sedan that followed him coasts to a stop next to him.

 

He gets in.

 

Xx

 

“I’m offering you a way back in, John. Anyone else would leap at the mere chance,” she says.

 

John’s hand rests calmly in his pocket. He stares her down.

 

“I believe we’ve established that I’m not like everyone else.”

 

M looks so small. The abandoned car park she brought him to shadows her, makes her look more tired and worn. She places a small hand on her jaw.

 

Her grey eyes find his blue.

 

“It’s a small assignment. You would rendezvous with Bond at Heathrow and take a plane to the south of France where a contact is waiting with explicit information regarding a leak within MI6 itself.” Her voice catches. “It seems there is no one left for us to trust. You and Bond are the only ones left.”

 

John rolls his shoulders.

 

“Trust,” he says softly. She takes a half-step back. The night wraps cold and cruel around them.

 

The silence blooms between them. John pulls out another cigarette, thinks better of it, and looks at the woman he once considered friend, mentor, boss, and something so much like a mother.

 

“Why?”

 

She stares at the ceiling, watching water drip from the concrete above them.

 

“He threatened the prime minister.”

 

He waits.

 

“We leave you alone for three weeks, the leader of parliament lives.” Her lower lip seems to tremble a moment, and John remembers missions, quartermasters. He remembers M talking in his ear when no one else would put up with him.

 

“I thought we didn’t negotiate with terrorists,” he says flatly.

 

He wishes he hadn’t.

 

“I thought so too,” she whispers. M shakes herself, and her powder blue suit moves with her. “I’ve been in charge a long time, John. And we’ve never--. But there was no other option.”

 

John thinks about Sherlock, and the way he looks at John out of the corner of his eye on a case.

 

He would bet his life the consulting detective would find another option.

 

“He wanted to cripple MI6 and he got it,” she continues, her voice gaining strength again. “He removed our best agent from the equation and watched the others lose trust in us, watched quartermasters rebel from dangerous assignments for fear there would be no backup for their agents. He watched the case load pile up and the times change. Espionage is becoming a way of the past, and it will continue to do so if we can’t repair the damage he caused.”

 

“Him being?”

 

“You know _damn well_ who I’m talking about. It was why you called me,” she spits.

 

He suddenly remembers that she was in the field once too.

 

“ _Moriarty_.” She sneers the name. “The man’s a ghost, completely untraceable. He lives within the walls of every major government, corporation, arms dealer, militia, and terrorist cell known to us. But we can never even get his bloody cheekbones on security footage. MI5’s in no better position and they’ve been tracking him for close to two years.”

 

She presses her lips together quickly, her eyes widening.

 

“You’ve enlisted Mycroft’s help to get me back in,” he says, taking a step back. “You sent Bond to drink with me, you sent him into my _house_? I’m not one of yours anymore, M.” John turns his back on her.

 

“We have ways of making you cooperate, 003.”

 

There is nothing about him she does not know.

 

He looks at her then, and M has never seen anything so terrifyingly promising. Anything so cold and resolved. She remembers the way he killed, the way he moved like the wind and slaughtered with all the cruelty of a sadist and the mercy of a saint.

 

 “If you touch him,” he whispers, his voice monotonous and like smoke in the air between them. “You’ll have much more than Moriarty to worry about.”

 

Xx

 

“If you looked up,” John says quietly. “There was only the cave. There was no illusion.”

 

Sherlock sits quietly beside him, looking down on diagrams and clean knives. His arm is bandaged. It barely hurts.

 

John came home smelling like cigarette smoke and car parks.

 

But he came home.

 

“That’s what torture is Sherlock.” He leans against the table, and Sherlock wonders what scars his jumper hides. “The pain is secondary.”

 

Sherlock steeples his fingers. They lean together over pictures of the victim, stark light illuminating the careful damage done to her body.

 

“I doubt you’ll find this guy if you don’t learn what would have driven her to the edge,” John says calmly. He points to her abdomen. “Her C-section scar is left completely unmarked. Almost the entirety of her stomach is. I would start there.”

 

He turns to go, his shoulders sagging with the weight of the night.

 

“What drove you?”

 

John stops.

 

“They counted.”

 

Sherlock catches his wrist, his long fingers encircling his tan skin. He is warm.

 

“How long I’d been there. Every minute no one got me out,” his voice is hoarse and slow. The words taste like vomit in his mouth. "Every second I was left behind."

 

His arm is released.

 

John moves up to his room in the darkness, and lets it seep into his skin. Lets it crawl inside him. He is not here. He is scattered on the street and in a car park and in Moscow and Bangkok and Switzerland and Afghanistan.

 

The violin begins hesitantly from below, feeling out the spaces around it, before it settles into song. He hears _Leibestraum_ float up from below, and lets himself sink. It is almost like Sherlock has embraced him.

 

He falls asleep.

 

He does not dream.

 

Xx

 

The phone is heavy in his hand.

 

He dials.

 

It picks up.

 

“What secret?”

 

Bond laughs.

 

Xx

 

“What’s that one?”

 

John stares up at the sky, trying to follow Sherlock’s eyes.

 

“Hercules.” John traces the figure. “He’s kneeling. Wounded after a battle with a dragon.”

 

Sherlock looks at him.

 

“He’s a warrior?”

 

John smiles wanly. “The strongest there was. He killed his own children under the goddess Hera’s spell, and was eventually murdered by his own wife.”

 

“You are not much like Hercules,” Sherlock says softly.

 

They drink. Sherlock has traded his wine for a beer tonight, and he makes a face after swallowing. 

 

“You’re not going to delete this later, are you?” John asks, and his voice is caught somewhere on a breeze.

 

“No,” Sherlock answers. “I don’t think I will.”

 

They go back to watching the stars.


	7. For Your Eyes Only

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so. So sorry that I haven't been around.  
> I'm sick, and undiagnosed. I'm uninsured so I can't get an endoscopy or a referral to a neurologist for my headaches until November 26th, when my mother's new insurance plan kicks in. I've been spending most of the summer almost totally unable to function and I've barely been keeping up with school since it started back. I'm now seeing a therapist for the depression being sick all the time has caused. It's probably only due to my boyfriend and some very close friends that I haven't been able to attempt suicide yet. I have been working on this, though. And it's very short and I'm not totally happy with it, but I really wanted something up soon. Thank you for the continued support, and I'll be trying my best to upload again soon.  
> Thank you.  
> -Han

John feels cut open.

 

The kitchen lights are sterile on his skin and he is spread out. He is barely breathing.

 

Sherlock stares him down, he holds his pocket magnifying glass. His fingers press into John; his eyes are a shocking silver. John feels he is beneath a microscope. He is crucified on their kitchen table, spread eagle on his back. The light catches on his bare skin, blue checkered boxers, scars. His flatmate looks at him with an interest that reminds John of chasing criminals and dead men washed up on the banks of the Thames with nothing but a receipt for Chinese takeout in his pocket.

 

Sherlock reads his skin like he is the Sunday morning obits.

 

John feels he is a cadaver.

 

He lets Sherlock roam across the canvas of his skin, catch on the pieces of him that are not smooth.

 

“What did you want for dinner?” he asks. He is very far away. He is hovering above the scene, watching John Watson MD play dead for his consulting lunatic flatmate.

 

“Irrelevant. Where did this come from?” John swallows, and it seems too loud in the cage of their kitchen. For once nothing is hissing or exploding, no vials shattering or meat bubbling on the stove. For once John is the experiment.

 

Sherlock is pressing against his left hip bone, and a half-moon scar that is weathered with age.

 

“I think I'll make pasta. You like pasta.”

 

His fingers dig in against the scar. John breathes.

 

“Knife fight. I was eighteen,” he whispers.

 

Not a whole lie.

 

Sherlock nods, and catches on new wounds, new scars he's carried for the last year. He asks questions without speaking. John answers.

 

John tells him to picture a compound. It looks like a cave. The inside is cavernous and wet, water falls from the ceiling in putrid pools. Your boots slosh through it when you walk. “It's hot,” he adds. “Much too hot, even at night.”

 

“Stop,” Sherlock whispers. His eyes are shut.

 

John smiles, it's soft, it's kind.

 

“I'll need to run by Tesco later,” he says. There is nothing else he could say.

 

Sherlock breathes, the audible sigh ghosts across the spaces between them. He moves to John's leg, his eyes are unreadable.

 

“Psychosomatic?” he murmurs.

 

John nods, as his flatmate lets his fingers trail across the pattern of scarring. He feels spread out, a Y-incision cut into his chest, skin folded back. Sherlock could see his heart if he looked. “Not enough damage to warrant a limp.”

 

John tells him to imagine a bucket of water; it's filled with vomit and human waste. They hold you beneath it. Your body rebels, you suck water in. You swallow.

 

“John.”

 

There is a dark look in his eyes. It is sharp against his skin.

 

John shakes his head, he can’t stop.

 

He tells him to imagine a knife, it's in your skin, your leg is on fire. He tells Sherlock to picture a brand, they've cauterized you. You hadn't known pain could be like that. Inside your very breath, tucked into every heartbeat.

 

“John,” Sherlock whispers.

 

He is not here.

 

“Come back,” he says. John does.

 

The kitchen lights are pooling on his skin; he's cold. He sits up. Sherlock's hand is on his shoulder. He leans into it.

 

“Pasta would be good,” Sherlock says after a long moment.

 

John smiles, nods. “Thank you.”

 

Xx

 

Sometimes John falls asleep to the taste of rain; it falls into his eyes and makes a home in the temporal lobe and brings to life all the things John can’t let himself forget. Like a lover in Casablanca with a knife beneath their pillow. Like compounds and bullets and desert sand. Like a name that starts with M and the color of Bond’s eyes. Like a limp and handgun.

 

Like a cabbie and a consulting detective.

 

Xx

 

They sip their tea.

 

“How did they find you?” Sherlock asks. He’s looking out the window, down at the street as it teems with life.

 

“Jump,” John whispers.

 

Xx

 

John makes pasta.

 

Sherlock eats.

 

He makes a joke about cadavers somewhere in between teaching Sherlock current politics and explaining that _yes it is important to know the Earth goes round the sun_ , and Sherlock laughs. The kitchen lights catch on the pale expanse of his throat, and John imagines he can see his pulse. The sound fills up the room, floods it. John is floating in it.

 

He laughs too.

 

It’s good.

 

Xx

 

Sherlock plays until the early hours of the morning, soft, sweet things that John can rest to.

 

And he does.

 

He wakes when the night is still blanketing the city, and he is still playing. John smiles into the darkness and rolls over. Sleep takes him again.

 

Xx

 

The first time he gut a fish, he cried. The insides were warm and pink in his hands, and he imagined his palms taking the color. Absorbing it through his thin skin and letting it slide along his veins, swim. That’s what made the creases in his palms. They stretch like little canyons, little river beds, where fish dry up and heave themselves still.

 

John remembers that.

 

The first time he gut a fish, his father had to carry him home on his shoulders. He could see the whole world, and the wild horses grazing by the river edge startled at his height. They threw their heads back and kicked and made white water, like he was a God, and the icebox his father carried was Pandora’s.

 

They had the fish for dinner.

 

John believes it is still swimming on his veins, tangling with wounds and memory from the service. He thinks he can feel it moving now, in the silence of the flat.

 

It’s a sterile kind of quiet.

 

The kind that comes only after storms, when the wind has died down and the thunder has faded, and the sky is blown wide and open. It consumes him; it crawls into his chest and makes a home in his lungs. Every breath he takes is borrowed from the silence.

 

Sherlock is curled on the couch like some great pale dragon, blue silk dressing gown wrapped tight around his body. He does not look at John. John, who is holding a handgun, who is staring at the wall, who is swallowed in the silence of the after shot.

 

He feels like the spaces inside him are filled with water, and his heart is struggling against the tide to beat.

 

“What is _wrong_ with you?” he whispers. “What. What is _wrong_ with you?”

 

And he’s there; white-knuckling John’s jumper and shoving him up against their wall with white fire in his smoke colored eyes. John thinks they look like fly wings. He bares his teeth and John can taste confusion and frustration in the spaces between them.

 

“What’s wrong with _you_?” he demands.

 

John looks down.

 

The first time he gut a man, he walked naked into a river and pretended he knew what fish felt when they caught a hook in the corner of their mouth.

 

“They never lost me,” he admits. Sherlock drops him. His back slides down the wallpaper. He pulls his knees to his chest. “They never lost me.”

 

Xx

 

“Did you two have a domestic?” Mrs. Hudson asks the incomplete room.

 

Sherlock looks up slowly and shakes his head. She leaves quietly after making a fuss about the wall and the severed head in the fridge that John hadn’t found before leaving. Sherlock returns to watching the ground, his eyes still and a dull green.

 

There’s a complete silence, that sinks into his pale skin. And then--

 

the world rushes in very, very fast.

 

Xx

 

John rises before Bond.

 

“— _hailed as the artistic find of the century_ ”

 

His neck aches from the couch, and a cup of coffee warms his hands. The telly is a soft intrusion on the morning quiet. James is stumbling from his bedroom, his scars catching the light. He grins.

 

“Wishing you’d slept with me?”

 

John smiles, and flicks his eyes between Bond and the television. “Think I’ll let you keep dreaming of me,” he says.

 

“You wish.”

 

“— _over twenty million pounds_.”

 

James sits next to him on the couch, until their thighs are touching. They are both watching the television. John is wondering what this would feel like if Bond was tall and thin and pale. He shakes himself.

 

“Thank you for calling.”

 

“Thank you for picking up.”

 

A river runs through their veins, they can hear the white water when their heart beats. Fish swim in the river. They heave themselves dry when a bullet makes a home in a leg. They heave until they’re still, and then they slip with the river into a compound floor. He swallows. He feels as if he was carried here on the wind, like he had no choice. Like something in the air decided that his shaking hands and thrumming heart had to be resolved. It picked him out of the river beneath the fabric of stars and whispered in his ears to find answers.

 

Because pieces of him are rotting.

 

They are turning odd colors and blistering and dissolving and leaving him. They fall out by his bedside and the clinic and they get swept downstream before he can think to grab them and cradle them between his palms. At night he lays on his back in bed and marvels over the new spaces inside him, pockets of air that used to house something important. He can’t remember what they were anymore.

 

He imagines a great detective could find them all for him.

 

“-- _There’s been a massive explosion in central London._ ”

 

He snaps his gaze to the television in tandem with Bond _._ A caption reads _House destroyed on Baker Street_.

 

John can feel his heartbeat in the tips of his fingers.

 

Can feel a fishhook in the corner of his mouth.

 

He’s standing before he’s aware of it, sloshing coffee over the lip of the mug and onto his jeans. He’s already moving to the door when James catches his arm.

 

“Let me come with you.”

 

John looks wild, like a cornered animal.

 

“He can’t know.”

 

Bond seems to sink into himself, but his eyes look urgent and raw. John remembers that look from Afghanistan, when James let him lean on the other agent and told him he was going home, he promised. Just hold on.

 

“John, the last secret.”

 

He whispers it in the way a lover might, and John remembers a week ago, when he and Sherlock watched the clouds above their roof for a piece of the sky. And John whispered about the home he made with the boys in Kabul, and Sherlock whispered back.

 

An explosion on Baker Street.

 

A whisper the night before as he was leaving, something tumbled around in Sherlock’s mouth that he didn’t want to let go and that John couldn’t be sure he heard at all. It might have been _stay_. But he’d never know.

 

“Tell me.”

 

Xx

 

Sherlock is sitting stiffly in the middle of the wreckage, plucking softly at his violin. He looks undamaged. He doesn’t look at John. Mycroft does.

 

“Doctor Watson, have you considered my offer?” he asks bluntly, before passing a file folder into John’s hands.

 

Sherlock’s hands freeze on the strings.

 

“I’ve considered shooting you, but I understand the Queen might take offense,” he snaps.

 

The younger brother smiles, and it’s like slipping into a river in August. When the water is cool and endless and can float you all the way to spring.

 

When Mycroft leaves and the folder for the missing missile defense programs is in John’s hands, Sherlock turns to him.

 

“Bond?”

 

“Couch.”

 

“Obvious, John,” he whispers, his eyes crinkling at the corners. His phone rings, cutting through the silence, and Sherlock handles it quickly. “Lestrade, I’ve been summoned. Coming?”

 

“If you want me.”

 

They look at each other like they are still drinking on the roof, pieces of them mixing in with the stars they can’t quite see. When Sherlock speaks, it’s in the same whisper.

 

“Of course, I’d be lost without my blogger.”

 

Xx

 

He calls Mycroft when they reach Scotland Yard, and Sherlock is sweeping into the building like he owns it. He hisses down a line what Bond had hissed at him. The silence on the other end is engulfing.

 

“If this gets us killed, if this gets _him_ killed,” he warns. “Your organization, your secretary, your brain, won’t mean anything. People much more dangerous than you owe me favors.”

 

He hangs up.

 

He joins Sherlock.

 

Xx

 

The pink phone rests in Sherlock’s palm.

 

It’s new, it pips.

 

They think the same name together. But no one says it aloud.

 

John can feel his gun tucked into his jeans.


	8. Die Another Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry this has been so long.
> 
> I'm finally healthy--physically and mentally--so I felt like I could finally return to this fic and not want to wallow in self-hatred.
> 
> Comments are very very much loved. 
> 
> Thank you guys so much for your support, it's been so so important to me.

The light falls milky through the dusty flat, catching John’s skin in its soft grasp. He tries to let it warm him as his body aches, his fingers thrumming against his thigh in want up a cuppa. He sighs, leaning back into his chair as if the old wounds don’t still pull at him oddly.

 

His phone hums in his pocket, and he catches Sherlock’s eyes before he picks it up, his breath leaving him slowly.

 

“ _Soho 2001_.”

 

The line goes dead.

 

“Well?”

 

John closes his eyes, runs his hand through his hair. Tries not to think about the grey colonizing through the blonde at his temples.

 

“An old contact,” he mutters, not looking at Sherlock. “Met some decent ones in Kabul last tour that cared far more about the politics of it all than I did.”

 

Sherlock turns, his hand tightening on the pink phone, waiting for it to chime again. “And?”

 

“He’s let himself be heard once before,” is all John says on the matter, his mouth tightening at the corners, before he sits up straighter. “That’s why he killed her, yeah? Cause she started to talk about him.”

 

Sherlock nods, and his hair catches the slow light—looks for a moment so bright, John thinks there must be a halo hidden there. Just out of the sight of mortals.

 

“Why is he playing this game with you?”

 

In another world, there’s a man John only ever dreamed of. The cut of his suit is expensive, and his watch glints in the neon bar-light. He doesn’t look at John—his face turned away. John knows his name, here, knows what to call him and how to sidle up beside him in a crowded bar and to slide him a flash drive with a half-drunk White Russian across the polished wood. They never look at each other for longer than a moment.

 

In another world, another time, John’s hand tightens on the man’s wrist a fraction. He leans close, his breath stained with rich bourbon. _Game’s on, yeah?_

 

_Soon, Johnny boy. You’ll wanna be in the middle of it when it starts, yeah? Gonna be the ride of your life._

He’s gone before John can hold him back. And that voice. That was the only time he’d heard the man speak. The only time he’d seen him. And that voice was so _soft_.

 

Like he was always telling secrets.

 

“I think he wants to be distracted,” Sherlock mutters, but his eyes stay on John for a moment. Fixed, like they were when he played cadaver for him on the kitchen table. And he feels like that again.

 

Dissected.

 

“I hope you’ll be happy together,” John spits, because he can. Because it hurts. Because his hands want to grip and pull apart the past and slide back up next to a man at a bar and hold him by the throat. Because he’s still in a compound in Afghanistan. Because he’s still sitting in front of Bond and M, so fucking young at the base of those mountains, ready for anything.

 

“I’ve disappointed you.”

 

John lets himself crumble a moment.

 

Sherlock watches the doctor sag in his chair and look, for a moment, like he’s seen so much more than Sherlock could ever know. He looks like a stranger.

 

“No, Sherlock.” His voice is like cut glass; it stings when it hits the taller man. “You haven’t.”

 

Is he bleeding with it?

 

“This game Sherlock—this game. It’s not like your normal cases, okay? It won’t end when you solve the last puzzle,” he whispers. “It’ll only get worse, and when it does? How much of a _distraction_ do you really think you’ll serve?”

 

Sherlock breathes, his brow furrowed and pulse quickening. There’s something like steel beneath the doctor’s skin, and for a moment he aches to feel it. He forces himself to smile, while he searches for the next puzzle.

 

He feels like a shark.

 

“We’ll just have to stay a step ahead, then,” he whispers.

 

Xx

 

In the nights before Sherlock, the alcohol swam warm on his veins and his hands shook like naked tree limbs in wind. The dark would climb up in the ravines of his bones and settle, heavy and cold. He could never make out the stars, in the spaces between him and the sky, and he curled soft and worn with the memory of stale water and vomit and concrete, around his gun like it might anchor him.

 

He would press the barrel to his temple, just to feel the pick-up flutter of his heartbeat.

 

Sherlock looks at him in the taxi, and the air is static charged, is changing.

 

He says, “John.”

 

“It’s nothing.”

 

Xx

 

The bank of the Thames blushes with the kiss of the tide, the water falling against the pebbly shore. Lestrade leads them slowly, the hollows of his eyes blooming with purple bruises like the delicate petals of irises in late spring. He clutches a cup of coffee; he doesn’t speak. John watches the grey water roll with the current, the wind pushing white caps into the surface, like soft flushes of snow.

 

He lets a smile flicker for a moment on his mouth.

 

In the early light, Sherlock moves as if in dreams—his pale skin glowing softly against the grey sky. London hums to life around them, waking quickly to the washed-out morning as John ducks below police tape and feels the sand and rocks beneath his shoes.

 

And sometimes, when it’s like this, he can almost taste the dreams of the years he’s lost to high-speed chases and ruling the world. Crime bosses and the bite of expensive liquor. When it’s like this, kneeling beside the starfished body of a middle aged security guard, the weight of his gun heavy against his waist, he’s almost back there.

 

He’s almost on the run.

 

His smile drops.

 

Sherlock watches him drop to his haunches; his eyes look translucent in the morning haze, like fly wings. John can feel the air beside him warmed with Sherlock, standing still in the cold. It feels like Q nestled in his ear. It makes something in his chest twist warm and tight.

 

“This,” John whispers, his eyes flickering over the body; the pale skin flushed with fingerprint bruises. His own hands flutter over the pattern, his fingers stretching to fill the spaces. “I know this.”

 

At twenty-seven the white took him; the north swallowed him until his dried space-cadet provisions were three days gone and his hip flask of too-expensive whiskey warmed him more than his thick coat. The wasteland planes swallowed him in blizzard, as he caught whispers and secrets by the tips of his fingers. They talked about a monster, born in the cradle of snow.

 

They talk about the bodies.

 

Too many to count, constellation bruises on their faces, before they had time to raise their voices. Six weeks chasing the stories, before M called him back for something bigger, and by then Russian felt easier on his cold tongue than his mother language. The way that name rolled around his mouth felt more familiar than his own.

 

“Golem.”

 

Sherlock breathes beside him, almost a gasp, slipping through his perfect control. John stood warily, old scars pulling at the stretch.

 

“John--”

 

His voice sounded hollowed-out.

 

John smiles, shrugging against the wind. “Boys tell ghost stories in war, you know,” he says easily. “Like to think they’re spies or summat, when there’s nothing better to do. Kent used to tell about the Golem almost as often as he bitched about not seeing his girl for four months on.”

 

“I don’t understand,” Lestrade starts, his brows furrowed.

 

The wind picks up suddenly, and John thinks Lestrade is the most honest of them all. Because none of them know what they’re doing anymore, and John can taste the way his blood _rushed_ when he handed over a small drive with the dirt on England’s biggest drug lords. How his heart thundered when Q hissed in his ear to make the drop to _the best_ and to back off, because this wasn’t his game anymore. Because _you did good getting in with the crime family so deep,_ but it’s too big for the new kid.

 

“Do any of us?” he mutters, bringing himself back. Something slithers in his veins, something heavy and afraid—like he hasn’t been in years.

 

He was in over his head.

 

John sighs.

 

They all are.

 

Xx

 

“You’re a bit gone for him.”

 

John swallows, his hands clenching in his pockets. He’s standing in a lonely middle-aged man’s apartment with a grip on his phone and his eyes full of constellations. Bond is sitting in the window, chewing gum and picking at his nails.

 

“And you’re a bit of a tosser,” he answers mildly, crouching down to look through the telescope.  The spot in the sky is hazy, but John knows the cradle of night better than most men his age—knows what the stars look like from all over the world. “Our star-gazer here seemed inordinately interested in the Van Buren supernova.”

 

“You should watch what you give away, John.” James looks at him, and for the first time in too long, John feels like someone is really looking at him. “You’re starting to slip and you know he’ll see through you sooner or later.”

 

John hisses in a breath, irritation swimming in him. “The biggest secrets MI6 has ever kept are on the line. _Lives_ are on the line. You know what this will do to the agency if this gets out; what it’ll do to _you_ James.”

 

He looks at Bond and almost can’t breathe. Because suddenly he’s so young again—they both are. Suddenly they’re shooting the shit between training rounds and wearing suits worth more than they are and in so deep, so fast. And he feels vicious. He feels alive and angry like the first time he killed out of the desert.

 

“I don’t like you, Bond, but I’m not going to let this whole agency sink because M was too deep in the politics to see it coming. If Sherlock finds out, there’s no help for it.”

 

Bond grins, wolfish and wicked.

 

“There’s the Watson I know and love.”

 

Xx

 

Sometimes it’s all too much—

 

Sometimes the wind is too harsh against his skin and the bullets fly too viciously and the sex is too rough and the world spins too fast. Sometimes you got a little too caught up in who you were meant to be playing and you lost yourself. Sometimes there was too much blood on your hands and—

 

And you drowned in it.

 

Xx

 

The stars spin in the darkness, blooming galaxies across the empty theater and the narrative skips-skips-skips and it’s all spinning and—

 

It’s so beautiful.

 

The way Sherlock’s pale skin catches the flush of a thousand stars as he grits his teeth in concentration, slamming his hand onto the stage floor. The stars swirl around him, through him, and through the flashing lights he can just make out the stooped figure of the Golem rushing through the back exit. There’s blood rushing in his ears and he can feel his heartbeat in the tips of his fingers and everything is still spinning.

 

“John, you _missed_ ,” he spits, rising on trembling knees. His eyes bloom with dark spots, and the phantom press of the Golem’s fingers on his face makes his breath stutter.

 

“You’re alive aren’t you?!” John shouts back, stuffing his gun into the waistband of his pants. His eyes look like liquid steel, and Sherlock is falling into them, shoving himself to his feet and trying to keep himself steady.

 

“But how could you _miss_?”

 

“Oh, would you just shut up, and move? We’re running out of time!”

 

And he sounds so alive, so swept up in it all. He can see John smile in the darkness, that bitter edge the same as the first time they walked from a crime scene together, bumping shoulders in the cold night. And the theater is flushing with the stories of a hundred thousand stars, and they paint John Watson like he’s born from the sky, and Sherlock thinks it’s beautiful.

 

“John, I’m never letting you forget this.”

 

Xx

 

John is standing in the flush of dawn, his Sig heavy in his pocket and the rattle of the train beneath him like a lullaby. The rush of wind against his face makes him breathe deep, makes him grin feral in the morning. Train tops are one of his favorite places—the ground racing by and the sky huge and open.

 

“Yeah?” He asks loudly, straining to hear a response over the wind.

 

“I know you’re not preforming some dull task for my brother, John, when you could be helping me,” Sherlock’s voice says coldly. “Where are you?”

 

“Oh, did I lose your tail?” John asks around a laugh. He rolls his shoulders, his eyes trained on the oncoming row of apartment buildings. Mycroft should buy him a new suit for this, he thinks wryly. He still can’t believe the government that used to employ him lost their own _missile launch codes_. The level of ineptitude of the MI5 never ceases to amaze him.

 

“I was under the impression you would be at the scene, probably in some garish orange vest,” he says bitterly.

 

“But I’m not.”

 

“But you’re not.”

 

He laughs, and he must look a sight—his blonde hair getting long and curling over the tops of his ears, the wind pushing it forward as he bounces up on his toes. His eyes are wild, blue like the ocean, and he can taste his heartbeat on the tip of his tongue.

 

“He wasn’t killed on the tracks, so I’m arriving at the right location,” he says. In his voice is 003, secreted behind his clavicle and getting stuck in his throat. Is the flavor of gunpowder and gasoline pooling in his lungs, is that nicotine smell stuck on his fingertips. He’s an addict for this life.

 

Sherlock makes a sound—that one he makes whenever John says something he didn’t expect. It sounds like magic, to him. It’s something he wants to draw from Sherlock’s mouth every second, until the air around them is strangled with it.

 

“John--”

 

“Must be off, Sherlock. This is my stop!”

 

John breathes, the sharp scent of the wind curling deep inside him, and runs. The train rushes beneath him and the ground is a blur and on his heels he imagines the phantom bite of gunshots. His boots find the edge of the last car, and it’s every cliff edge and last breath he’d ever faced.

 

He jumps.

 

Xx

 

“Did you really think no one would come for it?”

 

The bike messenger starts, gripping at his chest like something is trying to get out. John is sitting on his couch, his hands aching from pulling himself over the concrete banister that lined the balcony. His gun is in his left hand, slung casually over his knee.

 

“Who are you?” the man stutters, his hands trembling.

 

“Of no concern.” John stands slowly, his gaze like ice. “Your name is going to be much more interesting to MI5,” he says conversationally, nodding to the blood on the windowsill.

 

“It was an accident!” He stumbles backwards, reaching for his bike like it can stop John’s cold eyes.

 

“Stealing the missile defense plans certainly wasn’t.”

 

The first time someone punched him, he’d gone down like lead. Dropped skinny and underfed to the grass at age eight, and the older boy laughed. But now.

 

John throws his body backwards, dodging like he could sidestep bullets in his sleep, and flips in the cramped space, kicking out to make contact with the man’s chest. He lands heavy against the window frame as John rights himself with as much grace as he can muster. He flicks the safety off his gun.

 

“Let’s try this again, shall we?”

 

Xx

 

“Do us a favor and drop this by Mycroft?” John asks, tossing the small jumpdrive into Sherlock’s lap. “Tell him he can buy me an Armani suit and kindly fuck off as a thank you.”

 

And Sherlock laughs.

 

The sound rockets through the room like the sweetest adrenaline, and John looks so tired and worn and the smile he gives the detective is something carved from the center of the goddamned universe.

 

Xx

 

“You know,” Bond says softly, the night wrapping around his shoulders like a familiar lover. He bumps John’s shoulder affectionately as they cross the street. “You make him laugh like he’s never been lonely.”

 

“Stop planting cameras on me when I come to see you.”

 

Xx

 

Behind his eyes, the darkness stirs. Something shifts. Something stretches.

 

He’s home.

 

Xx

 

The light is sterile.

 

The scent of chlorine is almost overpowering, but beneath that is the tang of gunpowder and plastic explosives. Sherlock moves with care.

 

“Brought you a little getting-to-know-you present. Oh, that’s what it’s all been for, hasn’t it? All your little puzzles; making me dance – all to distract me from _this_ ,” he hisses, holding out the memory stick. The pool water dances with reflected light.

 

“Are you…really so easy…to fool?”

 

Sherlock turns abruptly, his fingers trembling around the jumpdrive. He feels his heartbeat behind his collarbone.

 

“This is a turn up…isn’t it?”

 

John’s voice is so soft, like he’s sharing secrets.

 

He’s wrapped in a thick parka, the fur brushing his cheekbones and into the weatherworn lines of his face and something in his eyes is like the shine of a knife-edge. He looks like the most dangerous man Sherlock has ever met.

 

He blinks in a pattern the detective doesn’t see.

 

“ _John_?”

 

Xx

 

Something is ripping in Sherlock’s chest.

 

Xx

 

“Jim Moriarty. _Hi!_ ”

 

The man is grins, and his voice is breathy and high, like it’s on the tipping point of ecstasy. John breathes, feels the electric hum of the bomb strapped to his chest.

 

“Jim? From IT?” He asks, as if Sherlock needs to remember the way his boxers peeked over the top of his pants and his fingers skittered along the hem of his shirt. “Of course, your boy here must have been busy. Good thing too, otherwise this would have been over so much sooner. And where’s the fun in _that_?”

 

“What do you mean?” Sherlock asks, stepping forward. His pale fingers tighten on the gun he’d secreted from John’s bedside. The Browning is heavy and unfamiliar in his hands and he remembers the night three weeks ago when John whispered to himself about teaching him how to hold it properly.

 

The target on John’s chest flickers up caresses his cheek.

 

“Oh he hasn’t _told_ you?” Moriarty says excitedly, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his suit. “Johnny and I are the best of friends!”

 

The silence swells between them like a tasteless poison, sinking into the hollows of Sherlock’s eyes and the spaces between his ribs.

 

“Tell him, John! Oh, tell him, tell him. The suspense is _killing_ me!” He laughs, and John thinks it sounds like the last heaving breath of the first man you kill. The vicious, alive feeling you swallow after the light in their eyes goes out.

 

“John.”

 

The doctor doesn’t look at him.

 

“Did you really think you knew everything there was to know, Sherlock? Did you really think you knew everything about John H. Watson?”

 

 “Sherlock, it’s okay. It’s fine.”

 

“IT IS NOT FINE!” Moriarty’s voice turns booming, echoes. He can feel the air around them shatter. Feels like glass is getting stuck in his lungs. “Why don’t you tell him the truth, John? Why don’t you tell him about Casablanca and the Czech Republic? The people you’ve killed? Tortured?”

 

“John what is he talking about?” Sherlock asks, the hand on the gun quivers like pale flowers in a breeze.

 

“Sherlock, jump,” John whispers. His voice is carved from the night, shimmering with stars as it slides across Sherlock’s skin. "You have to trust me."

 

“What about the bombs you’ve set off? The diplomats gone missing? The governments you’ve toppled single-handedly? Or has MI6 moved on from those games?” Moriarty taunts, moving closer. His steps seem to glide, a grace in him that reminds John of all the ballroom dances he’d ever slipped into, Q huffing quietly in his ear.

 

“John.”

 

There’s a bomb strapped to his chest and John is at the base of the Hindu Kush, saying goodbye to anyone he might ever love. Moriarty is almost an arms-length away and John is chasing bullets and jumpdrives and the memory of sticky-hot wounds in a compound in the desert. Bond is half-dead in a shitty pool locker room and John is slipping into the memory of bandaging each other up in the southern Ukraine in the early morning. The corner of Sherlock’s mouth is pulled taught and John can’t breathe.

 

“Tell us, John. TELL US.”

 

The echo of Moriarty’s voice wraps around him like a snake and suddenly he’s there. He’s alive. He’s home as the man moves to block out the ice in Sherlock’s gaze. John rushes him, wraps his arm securely underneath the smaller man’s chin and _presses_.

 

And it’s so good.

 

It’s so good like the first time he slid into this Austin Martin and let the city speak to him. Like the first time he jumped a train in Dubai and saved two hundred lives. Like the first slide of expensive liquor down his throat among the glittering dresses and the champagne and, yes, even the stars.

 

It’s so good that he leans in, smells Moriarty’s cologne and feels the give of his Adam’s apple against his forearm and hisses.

 

“Watson. John Watson. Agent 003.”

 

The world stops turning.

 

The red light flickers again, caresses, flutters along John’s features like it’s memorizing him. Like it’s lingering.

 

Before it moves to Sherlock.

 

“Shown your hand there, haven’t you, agent?”

 

In the corner of his eye he sees the shadow of a man, high above him in the rafters—the shape of him is like a memory swimming on the edges of a drunken night. He moves like something fragile, some whispered secret on the wind.

 

“Poor little 003, left the agency out of his mind with a name stuck in his head. M left you behind, didn’t she, pet? DIDN’T SHE?” he taunted, bucking against John’s grip. The bomb presses into his back, and John can see Sherlock’s eyes, wild with the reflection of John’s voice. He lets Moriarty go, watches the man step like a dancer away from him. “So what _was_ your torture for? The pain? What name did you bring home with your limp? Care to share?”

 

“John,” Sherlock breathes.

 

It’s the softest John’s ever heard him speak. It sits warm and heavy in his chest, and it tastes like cigarette smoke and beakers and kitchen experiments. It tastes like running on rooftops and learning how to live again.

 

John swallows, tries to keep the memory of Sherlock’s mouth curving into his name.

 

“Sherlock, I was never lost, remember? No one ever lost me,” he says softly, his hands in his pockets. Sherlock nods, his fingers trembling. “And I’m not lost now. It’ll be okay.”

 

Moriarty laughs, his head thrown back, his teeth shining in the cool lights. “Do you really think MI6 can save you?” he asks, his grin shark-like and cold. “Or did your toy, Bond, not tell you the last secret they have to keep?”

 

John swallows, and around his chest is a bomb, and in his hand is dental floss that isn’t dental floss. “I know who you are, Moriarty,” he says, his voice like steel. The shadow above him shifts. Sherlock breath hitches. And--

 

“That’s 001 to you.”

 

John moves.


End file.
